Vol. 15, No. 2 (Summer 2025) HUMANIMALIA Humanimalia is a biannual journal devoted to the study of human– animal relations. It is interdisciplinary, open-access, and peer-reviewed, publishing original articles from a wide range of cultural, historical, philosophical, political, and aesthetic perspectives. Humanimalia has three aims: (1) to explore and advance the vast range of scholarship on human–animal relations; (2) to encourage exchange among scholars working from a variety of disciplinary perspectives; and (3) to promote dialogue between the academic community and those working closely with animals in non-academic fields. We invite innovative works that situate these topics within contem- porary culture via a variety of critical approaches. Ideally, we seek papers that combine approaches, or at the very least draw upon research in other disciplines to contextualize their arguments. We are particularly interested in papers that acknowledge and seek to advance a more-than-human conception of aesthetics, culture, society, and politics. https://humanimalia.org Cover: Crow, Talitha May (2025) Editorial Board Editor-in-Chief Kári Driscoll Utrecht University Associate Editors Clemens Driessen Wageningen Univeristy Monica Mattfeld University of Northern British Columbia Emelia Quinn University of Ottawa Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa Seattle University Marianna Szczygielska Czech Academy of Sciences Kerstin Weich Independent scholar Book Reviews Editor Dominic O’Key University of Cambridge Production Assistsant Imogen Grigorovich Intern Lotte Suardi Layout and Typesetting Kári Driscoll Editorial | iii Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) We are pleased to present the latest issue of Humanimalia — a “summer” rather than a “spring” issue, in recognition of the fact that our publishing rhythm has been gradu- ally drifting away from the equinox and toward the sol- stice. This issue features five original research articles, plus a translation and accompanying introduction, as well as five book reviews. Monica Mattfeld’s essay, “The Spanish Horse and the Thunder Drum”, opens the issue with a meditation on memorialization and nonhu- man agency. Mattfeld reconstructs the life, death, and curious after- life of the “Spanish Horse”, a star performer at Astley’s Amphitheatre whose tanned hide was transformed into a thunder drum after his death circa 1824. Challenging conventional understandings of taxi- dermy and objecthood, Mattfeld argues that the drum constitutes an “animal-made-object” which retains traces of the Spanish Horse’s subjectivity and agency even beyond death. Through a synthesis of new materialism, ecofeminism, and taxidermy theory, she critiques models that either erase animal individuality or treat animal remains as ethically indistinct from other matter. Proposing an expanded definition of taxidermy, Mattfeld shows how the horse’s disarticu- lated form continued to speak — literally and symbolically — within the theatre’s affective soundscape, as both a memento mori and a sublime, politically charged memorial. If Mattfeld’s Spanish Horse finds a strange kind of afterlife, Paul G. Keil’s “The Feral at Home” brings us back to the compromised vi- tality of the living. In his ethnographic account of a wild-caught pig named Pig-pig, raised by an Australian pig hunter, Keil destabilizes the dominant narrative of the feral as irredeemably invasive and un- livable. Pig-pig’s presence within — and resistance to — this narra- tive illuminates an “unauthorized multispecies home”, where feral agency flickers, if briefly, outside frameworks of control. The article explores the unexpected attachments and ethical entanglements that arise when a being defined by its killability is, temporarily, al- lowed to become someone. But as Keil’s conclusion reminds us, these alternate trajectories remain precarious, forever shadowed by the lethal scripts of biosecurity and belonging. iv | Editorial Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) Shifting from individual animals to collective movements, Marco Reggio’s “‘Happy Goats, or, Taking Embarrassment Seriously”, ap- pearing here in English for the first time, takes as its point of depar- ture the life and death of Agitu Ideo Gudeta — an Ethiopian refugee, feminist entrepreneur, and goat farmer, whose 2020 murder became a cause célèbre in the Italian media. Originally published in Italian as the first chapter in his book Cospirazione animale, Reggio’s essay re- sists both celebration and simple condemnation, instead confront- ing the ethical and political contradictions that emerge where ques- tions of species, gender, race, and coloniality intersect. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s “zone of non-being” and Judith Butler’s remarks on the “embarrassed ‘etc.’” that invariably comes at the end of lists of intersectional identity markers, Reggio proposes a politics grounded not in certainty but in discomfort — a willingness to sit with paradox, to resist both moral purity and political disavowal. What emerges is a vision of an anti-speciesism that is intersectional, historically situ- ated, and radically open to complexities of the more-than-human. In the accompanying introduction, Suleiman McShane and Erin Clancy offer a critical entry point into Reggio’s thought, situating his work within the broader landscape of Italian animal rights activism and anti-speciesist critique. In his trenchant analysis of police dogs as instruments of racial bio- capitalism — spanning Civil Rights-era attacks on Black protestors, the affective copaganda of PAW Patrol, and the Israeli military’s de- ployment of robot dogs in Gaza — Ishaan Selby exposes how animal life is made complicit in processes of domination, expropriation, and organized abandonment. In tracing how the figure of the dog me- diates between the human and nonhuman, Selby challenges us to confront the biopolitical entanglement of species and race in the carceral logics of the modern state. His call to think Black, Palestin- ian, and animal liberation together does not suggest equivalence, but insists on relationality — on the need to recognize the shared in- frastructures of violence, and thus the possibilities for shared resist- ance. As with the other contributions to this issue, Selby’s essay de- mands that we take seriously the more-than-human dimensions of justice and the more-than-human consequences of injustice. Editorial | v Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) Eugenie van Heijgen’s “Becoming Pheasant” offers a fitting counter- point to these overtly political interventions by shifting the focus to the long, entangled history of hunting, landscape-making, and spe- cies formation in the Dutch countryside. Van Heijgen traces how the pheasant — bred, released, and shot for centuries — has been mate- rially and discursively produced by human desire, rendered legible and illegible by shifting regimes of conservation and control. Today, even in the absence of sanctioned pheasant release, these birds per- sist: elusive, unclaimed, and actively remaking their own multispe- cies lifeworlds. In resisting fixed designations — wild or domestic, na- tive or invasive — van Heijgen’s pheasants exemplify what it means to inhabit Anthropocene landscapes as both more-than-human ar- chives and speculative futures. Like the goats, dogs, pigs, and horses that traverse this issue, pheasants prompt us to reconsider the cat- egories that govern life, death, and possibility across species lines. Finally, Bert Theunissen’s critical history of sheepdog trialling casts a long view over the development of shepherding as both practice and performance. Drawing on extensive archival sources, Theunis- sen traces how Border Collies were shaped not just by the demands of farm work but by the stylized masculinity and aesthetic ideals of nineteenth-century trialling culture. Far from improving practical herding, trialling produced a type of “sporting dog” optimized for spectacle, often at the expense of both sheep welfare and farm util- ity. Today, as many working shepherds reject the trial collie in favour of more cooperative herding styles — some even experimenting with forms of leading rather than driving — Theunissen calls on us to re- consider entrenched ideas of control, obedience, and animal labour. Taken together, the essays in this issue traverse a range of geogra- phies, genres, and disciplinary formations to ask how species come to matter — and to whom. They explore the fragile, fraught, and sometimes hopeful terrain of interspecies relation under conditions of ongoing ecological, colonial, and epistemic violence. Whether at- tending to the figure of the goat as a site of ethical contradiction, the police dog as an instrument of racial biocapitalism, or the pheasant as a product of forgotten stewardship, these essays insist on the vi | Editorial Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) necessity of sustained, situated, and intersectional critique. What emerges is a portrait of a world in which the categories of species, labour, value, and resistance are contested and reconfigured across shifting ecological, colonial, and political terrains. As usual, the issue also features a range of critical reviews of recent books in human–animal studies and related fields. Ben De Bruyn discusses the late Karen Bakker’s The Sounds of Life and Gaia’s Web, two popular science books that explore the intersection of digital technology, environmental science, and interspecies communica- tion. De Bruyn appreciates Bakker’s cautious optimism and her in- sistence on exploring digital technology’s potential to aid rather than hinder human connection with the natural world. At the same time, he also raises concerns about the limits of digital environmentalism and the risk of techno-solutionism. While Bakker urges us to imagine a future of “kinship acoustics” and planetary listening, De Bruyn re- minds us of the extractive logics that often underlie even the most well-intentioned ecological projects. In their joint review of Josh Milburn’s Just Fodder (2022) and Food, Jus- tice, and Animals (2023), Carlo Salzani and Zipporah Weisberg take is- sue with Milburn’s liberal framework, particularly its implicit endorse- ment of capitalism as a viable context for multispecies justice. While they welcome Milburn’s detailed analyses of relational obligations across species and his commitment to finding workable solutions in a world reluctant to abandon animal products, his zoopolis, they ar- gue, remains entangled in a logic of exploitation, presenting reform- ist solutions that fail to challenge systemic structures of oppression. This view stands in implicit critical dialogue Pablo Castelló’s review of Matthew Calarco’s The Three Ethologies (2024), in which Castelló mounts a defence of liberal political theories of animal rights — es- pecially Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Zoopolis — which, in his view, has been unfairly dismissed by critical animal studies scholars as be- ing purely individualist, when in fact such accounts retain crucial tools for articulating collective territorial rights and animal subject- hood. Calarco’s central claim is that forging more just and meaning- ful human–animal relationships requires a transformation of self and Editorial | vii Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) society along three interrelated lines of “ethological” practice — men- tal, social, and environmental — rooted in the Greek notion of askesis, or disciplined ethical formation. Drawing on narrative ethnography, Indigenous thought, and everyday multispecies encounters, Calarco explores how humans might resubjectify themselves in response to animals’ lives and worlds, emphasizing relationality, attentiveness, and dwelling. Castelló highlights The Three Ethologies not only as a philosophical intervention, but also as a call to action — one that asks readers to risk vulnerability, embrace co-becoming, and see with, rather than simply look at, the more-than-human world. Talitha May, whose striking image of a crow building a nest of twigs graces the cover of this issue, reviews Jacqueline Emery and David Lei’s Finding Flaco: Our Year with New York City’s Beloved Owl (2024), a nonfiction account of a Eurasian eagle owl who escaped the Central Park Zoo, becoming a viral sensation. As May shows, the book is more than a lavish photo-documentary; it is a reflection on perception, ur- ban ecology, and the contested politics of freedom. May invites us to consider what it means for a non-native, “escaped” animal to cap- ture the human imagination, and what kinds of lives become thinka- ble or lovable in the urban wild. The review raises difficult questions about the sentimental logics of animal celebrity and the limits of an- thropocentric empathy. And yet, Flaco’s story also functions as a rup- ture — “a cut in the mesh of captivity” — that points toward a broader reckoning with the institutionalized confinement of nonhuman lives. Finally, returning to the uncanny material afterlives of animal bodies with which the issue began, Poulomi Choudhury reviews Elizabeth Effinger’s Taxidermy and the Gothic: The Horror of Still Life (2024), a provocative exploration of taxidermy as a material and affective site of Gothic horror. Tracing how preserved animal bodies evoke stasis, dread, and ontological unease, Effinger argues that taxidermy func- tions as a “dark mirror” reflecting systemic violence, perverse de- sires, and the blurred boundary between life and death. Choudhury praises the book’s ambition and interdisciplinary scope but notes its limited engagement with the material conditions of animal death. While the book provocatively critiques “critical taxidermy studies” for viii | Editorial Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) sanitizing or aestheticizing taxidermy, it risks reproducing the same move by reducing animal death to metaphor and human projection. As Choudhury argues, the horror of taxidermy is not only that we might become mounts — but that the animal already has. In addition to her book review, Talitha May also provided the image that graces the cover of this issue. It was inspired by two crows who began building a nest on a ledge of her apartment building this past spring. “Throughout the day,” she writes, “the crows build their nest with malleable twigs they snip from trees. […] Often, they would dis- card the materials they had brought to their nest, but then days after, re-visit their drop piles and methodically sift through material. The mandala-like design represents the regularity of crow time, egalitar- ian turn-taking, methodical choices, and graceful lines of flight. Rather than fly directly to their nest, for instance, they often circled the court- yard until a final lift to the eave. In contrast to the disruption and un- predictability of human induced global climate change, crow time and methodology characterizes a rhythmic orderliness. The stark- ness of the design also references how in late winter when gathering en masse at dusk, their bodies appear like crisp silhouettes.” We hope other readers will feel inspired to submit their art for consideration for future issues of Humanimalia. As always, I would like to thank the authors and peer reviewers, as well as all section editors, copyeditors, our intern Lotte, and our production assistant Imogen, for their hard work, egalitarian turn-taking, methodical choices, and graceful lines of flight, all of which contributed to bringing this issue to fruition — if not in time for spring, then at least before summer gives way to the stark sil- houettes of winter. On behalf of the editorial team, Kári Driscoll July 2025