Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History 0813929474, 9780813929477

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Copyright © 2012. University of Virginia Press. All rights reserved.

Beastly Natures

Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:51.

Beastly Natures Animals, Humans, and the Study of History

e dit e d by Dorot h e e Br a n tz

University of Virginia Press

Copyright © 2012. University of Virginia Press. All rights reserved.

Charlottesville & London

Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:51.

Copyright © 2012. University of Virginia Press. All rights reserved.

University of Virginia Press © 2010 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2010 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beastly natures : animals, humans, and the study of history / edited by Dorothee Brantz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8139-2947-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-8139-2995-8 (e-book) 1. Human-animal relationships—History. 2. Animals—Social aspects— History. I. Brantz, Dorothee. ol85.b43 2010 590 —dc22 2009048790

Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:51.

CONTENTS

Introduction | Dorothee Brantz 1 PART I

An Anthropological History of Animals and the Environment

Does “The Animal” Exist? Toward a Theory of Social Life with Animals 17 susa n j. pe a r son a nd m a ry w eism a ntel

Touching Animals The Search for a Deeper Understanding of Animals 38 N igel Rot h fe l s

Wolves in Sheep’s (and Others’) Clothing 59 Copyright © 2012. University of Virginia Press. All rights reserved.

Ga r ry M a rvin

PART I I

Acculturating Wild Creatures

Darwin in the Monkey Cage The Zoological Garden as a Medium of Evolutionary Theory 81 Oli v er Hoch a de l

Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk The Cultural Life of a Wild Animal in America 108 K e l ly E n r igh t

The Alligator’s Allure Changing Perceptions of a Charismatic Carnivore 127 M a r k V. B a r r o w J r .

Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:51.

PART I I I

Animals in the Service of Society

Nature Bridled The Treatment and Training of Horses in Early Modern England 155 P e t e r E d wa r d s

The Public and Private Lives of “First Dogs” Warren G. Harding’s Laddie Boy and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fala 176 H e l ena Pycior

The Legacy of Laika Celebrity, Sacrifice, and the Soviet Space Dogs 204 A m y Nel son

PART I V

Animating the City and the Countryside

The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City 227 Cl ay McSh a ne a nd Joel A . Ta r r

Copyright © 2012. University of Virginia Press. All rights reserved.

“Poor Dumb Brutes” or “Friends in Need”? Animals and River Floods in Modern Germany and the United States 246 U w e Lübk en

Counting Sheep in the English Lake District Rare Breeds, Local Knowledge, and Environmental History 264 H a r r i et R it vo

Notes on Contributors 281 Index 285

Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:51.

Copyright © 2012. University of Virginia Press. All rights reserved.

Beastly Natures

Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:51.

Introduction

Copyright © 2012. University of Virginia Press. All rights reserved.

Dorothee Brantz

“Observe the herd which is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today is. It springs around, eats, rests, digests, jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day, with its likes and dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment, and thus neither melancholy nor weary.”1 Friedrich Nietzsche’s well-known treatise The Use and Abuse of History for Life opens with this passage about herd animals’ quotidian existence and concludes, somewhat enviously, with the observation that “the beast lives unhistorically for it gets up in the present like a number without any odd fraction left over; it does not know how to play a part, hides nothing, and appears in each moment exactly and entirely what it is. Thus a beast can be nothing other than honest.”2 Nietzsche’s assertion that animals have no sense of the past echoes a long-standing philosophical debate about animal consciousness.3 Th is debate, which reaches back to the ancient Greeks, has generated many different hypotheses, but the most consequential of these was undoubtedly René Descartes’ mid-seventeenth-century dictum that animals possess neither language nor soul and hence cannot be considered sentient.4 Descartes’ notion that animals are mere automata laid the foundation for the exploitative att itudes toward animals that have been so dominant in the modern period. What Nietzsche posits as an enviable alternative to the human obsession with the past also expresses a deep divide between the human and nonhuman: whereas the former possesses historical consciousness and, with it, the 1

Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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ability to shape civilization, the latter supposedly does not. While it is certainly true that animals have not consciously contributed to the formation of the past, one must wonder if that also necessarily implies that they are not a part of history. In other words, even if animals live without a sense of the past, is it logical to conclude that they have played no role in the development of human societies? Judging by most historical scholarship, animals seem to have had no part whatsoever in human history. Th is omission may, however, reveal more about history as an academic discipline than it does about the past itself. After all, how could human societies have survived without the food, materials, labor, and entertainment that animals have supplied? What would the history of agriculture, transportation, the arts and sciences, and even warfare look like without animals? Nor does this omission reflect a lack of sources: historical records are fi lled with references to animals, attesting not only to their presence in but also to their significance for human communities. Animals are mentioned in legal documents and court records (until the eighteenth century, they could even be prosecuted for committ ing crimes such as theft or murder)5 as well as in parliamentary debates, civil ordinances, and municipal records. They are widely represented in visual documents, literary texts, statistical databases, and all sorts of media records; traces of them remain in countless diaries, memoirs, and personal papers. Rather than a dearth of sources, the problem with animals and history seems to be a question of agency. The academic discipline of history, in contrast to natural history, is premised on the notion of human agency. According to William H. Sewell, being an agent “means to be capable of exerting some degree of control over the social relations in which one is enmeshed, which in turn implies the ability to transform those social relations to some degree.”6 Sewell also argues that the capacity for agency is inherent in all humans, but he notes that the form such agency takes is highly specialized and dependent on an individual’s position within specific hierarchical social structures.7 Historians have long debated the issue of historical agency. The successive stages of historiography mirror the continuous critical reconsiderations of traditional concepts of power and social hierarchies and the concomitant expansion of notions about historical agents and the transformative effects of past events. In other words, since its inception as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, history has steadily broadened its outlook from an exclusionary focus on white male elites, diplomacy, and high culture to incorporate the poor, the illiterate, women, racial and religious minorities, and 2

Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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Introduction

other historically disenfranchised social groups. Along with this expansion of historical agents emerged a growing interest in everyday practices and the broader parameters of social, political, cultural, and economic life. Viewed from that perspective, it might seem inevitable that scholars would eventually turn their attention to animals; but, if one follows Sewell’s defi nition, the inclusion of the nonhuman in history requires a much greater intellectual leap since animals do not possess the ability to directly transform human structures and therefore cannot be considered historical agents.8 Incorporating animals into any historical narrative thus necessitates a radical rethinking of the project of history, which is in many ways synonymous with the project of modernity. When the field of history emerged as an academic discipline, it was established as the study of human culture and society and thus intentionally juxtaposed to natural history. Th is juxtaposition articulated the most fundamental premise of modernity: namely, the epistemological separation of nature and culture.9 One notable consequence was the emergence of separate intellectual traditions—the humanities on one hand and the natural sciences on the other. As its name indicates, the humanities focused on “humans”—a category that seemed for a long time quite narrowly conceived to include only white male elites. By contrast, the study of animals was assigned to the domains of natural history, biology, and the agricultural sciences. For historians, animals seemed to matter only insofar as they supplied the material resources necessary for the advancement of human societies. In that sense, animals were comparable to grain or timber. While it is certainly true that animals provided materials essential to human survival, this rather limited perspective cannot account for the complexity of humans’ historical engagements with animals. For one, animals are not just a commodity; they are living creatures. Indeed, it is precisely the recognition that animals cannot be treated simply as a material resource that has led to ongoing confl icts and problems in cultural, economic, legal, medical, and political contexts. The essays in this volume attest to the fact that even though people may have wanted to treat animals as mere resources, this desire to instrumentalize the nonhuman has been repeatedly challenged, and not least by the animals themselves when they refused to “play along.” It is necessary to distinguish in this discussion between different species of animals and their various impacts on human society: for example, horses have certainly played a much larger historical role than have octopi. Hence, one cannot draw a strict dividing line between humans and animals, especially since humans are themselves biological animals. Genetically, several 3

Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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animal species are more closely related to humans than to any other nonhuman species. And on a cultural level, many animals, particularly domesticated species, often have closer ties to human society than to the so-called natural world. After all, the long history of domestication attests to the perennial desire to assimilate certain animal species into the purview of human society.10 In a similar vein, the failed nineteenth-century experiments with acclimatization underscored the limits of human ambitions to dominate the natural world.11 In general, looking at the place of certain species vis-à-vis human society, one must inevitably question this modern epistemological distinction between culture and nature: if such a clear division exists, where do domesticated animals belong? Moreover, as several essays in this volume demonstrate, even supposedly “wild” animals like alligators, elephants, rhinoceroses, and wolves often defy the categorizations assigned to them. Hence, integrating animals into the study of history requires a fundamental rethinking of prevailing notions of nature and culture. Some historical subfields have begun to challenge this boundary. Most notably, environmental historians are focusing on the interaction between humans and the natural world in order to assess the impact of human society on the environment and vice versa. According to Donald Hughes, every topic in the field of environmental history falls into one of three general categories: (1) the influence of environmental factors on human history; (2) the environmental changes caused by human activity and the many ways in which these anthropogenic changes have affected the course of human societies; and (3) the impact on the environment of changing att itudes toward nature.12 The field of environmental history thus rests on the interaction between humans and their environment. But because environmental historians usually concentrate on landscapes and the built environment, animals, as Harriet Ritvo has observed, “have not been among the most prominent concerns of environmental historians, who have tended to focus on the roots of such modern issues as pollution or on large and contested concepts like ‘wilderness’ or ‘nature.’”13 To the extent that they have considered animals’ role in human history at all, environmental historians have viewed them as part of the wilderness, a threat to indigenous environments, a natural resource, or an obstacle to human sett lement.14 The pioneering works of Keith Thomas and Harriet Ritvo have encouraged a growing number of scholars to investigate the diverse cultural arenas in which animals have played a principal role.15 As Ritvo notes elsewhere: “animals can be seen as the latest beneficiaries of a democratizing tendency 4

Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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Introduction

within historical studies.”16 Cultural historians in particular are turning their attention to the historical development of human-animal relations. A burgeoning literature addresses the rise of animal-protection movements; pet culture; the emergence of circuses and zoos; the depiction of animals in art, fi lm, and literature; the cultural contexts of vivisection; and hunting for sport.17 Animal study groups have emerged in England, Australia, Germany, and the United States. Two years ago, the Internet Listserv “H-Animal” was established to inform scholars about the latest research, publications, and conferences in this field.18 The expanding interest in animals’ place in human society has raised questions about exactly how the nonhuman can be integrated into the study of history. Some scholars argue that it can be done only via representation— that is, only by analyzing human representations of and discourse on animals and our relationships with them. As Erica Fudge, one of the most prolific writers on this question, rightly asserts: “If our only access to animals in the past is through documents written by humans, then we are never looking at the animals, only ever at the representation of the animals by humans.”19 Yet she also insists that historians cannot focus exclusively on representations; instead, she urges them to pay attention to the material presence of animals. Hence, writing the history of animals demands negotiating our desire to recover the historical lives of animals vis-à-vis the fact that all of the available records of those lives have been produced by humans. Whether such a history can be anything but representational is thus one of the key debates in the emerging field of animal studies. The present volume contributes to this debate by exploring the concrete historical circumstances of human-animal interactions in Europe and North America during the modern period. Whereas each author looks at a distinct type of human-animal encounter, all emphasize the interrelations between humans and animals and seek to investigate the intersection—or collision, as the case may be—of animals and humans. While such a focus does not absolve us from thinking about the difference between humans and animals, it may shift our thinking away from binary oppositions and toward the relational spaces “in between,” or what Bruno Latour has called “hybrid relations.”20 Environmental historians have repeatedly claimed that nature is culturally constructed.21 Because animals have for millennia been categorized as either “wild” or “domesticated,” they embody the culturally constructed relationship between nature and culture. As several of the essays in this volume show, domesticated animals like horses and dogs have directly contributed to the 5

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development of human society. They have been used as a means of transportation, as tools for scientific advancement, and to perform political functions. Even wild animals, such as alligators, rhinos, or wolves, were oft en subjected to cultural practices and constructed notions of wildness. Yet, despite endless attempts to rationalize our engagements with animals through training, commodifying, displaying, and breeding them, our relations always remain ambiguous and beyond the grasp of instrumental reason. Luckily, an element of surprise and unpredictability persists whenever we look at animals and especially when they look back at us. Ultimately, animals escape us, and that is what makes them fascinating because they force us to think not only about us and them but also about the historical relationship between nature and culture, similarity and difference, theory and practice. These conceptual questions are explored in the opening section of this volume, which brings together three essays that approach the historical relevance of human-animal relations from different disciplinary contexts. In their coauthored essay, the historian Susan Pearson and the anthropologist Mary Weismantel fi rst outline the theoretical foundations of their respective disciplines and then turn to a discussion of how animals might be better incorporated into the study of history. In particular, these authors propose that closer attention to concepts of space may help us to defi ne animals’ cultural and social significance. Insisting that social space refers not only to our mental universe (where animals appear as nothing more than symbols or “objects of history”) but also to the physical spaces we share with animals, Pearson and Weismantel seek to recover animals as social actors by linking the symbolic and material traces they have left on human culture. To establish these links, they employ a methodology that combines environmental, social, and cultural history with the critical tools of anthropology and political economy. Finally, they urge us to rethink the notion of agency itself by historicizing the term rather than accepting it as universally valid. The second essay, by Nigel Rothfels, turns to a history of the senses in order to broaden our perspective on how humans have interacted with animals. He examines the idea of “seeing an animal” and how it has developed. He discusses in detail the fascination that elephants have always held for humans, analyzing our desire not just to observe these majestic creatures but also to touch, hunt, and kill them. Hence, he proposes that a history of human-animal relations should investigate not only the visual but also the tactile aspects of this encounter. Moreover, he notes that the interdisciplinary exchange with other researchers, especially those who work closely with ani-

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Introduction

mals, may offer us very different insights even if—or perhaps because—we sometimes disagree with them. The cultural anthropologist Garry Marvin also addresses the question of interdisciplinary approaches in his comparison of the relations between humans and wolves in Albania and in Norway. At the heart of his exposition stands the question of how and even if scholars of the humanities can write a history of animals. Marvin contends that a humanist approach cannot provide a straightforward perspective on animals because scholars’ views of them are always mediated by cultural constructions. Moreover, he insists that we speak of histories in the plural because both human societies and the animals that interact with them are too complex to be subsumed under a single historical rubric. To demonstrate this complexity, he examines att itudes toward wolves in Albania, where these predators threaten the livelihoods of shepherds and other rural residents, and in Norway, where wolves have become the subject of a major political controversy regarding their protection. According to Marvin, the case of Albania is especially pertinent because it demonstrates how our relations to animals are part of a complex system in which humans will eradicate one species (wolves) in order to protect another (sheep). He concludes that we should speak only of the relations between specific animals and specific groups of people. Garry Marvin’s essay on wolves also points to the inherent challenges that arise from human encounters with animals in the wild. Part 2 turns to these challenges in order to analyze how supposedly “wild” animals were integrated into different spheres of human society, particularly when it came to different forms of display and representation. Th rough acculturating the wild, human societies have always tried to strengthen their claims on and understanding of the natural world. Oliver Hochadel examines European zoological gardens as a space for the popularization of evolutionary theories during the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the exhibition of primates, Hochadel explains how visitors internalized Darwinian ideas through their face-to-face contact with apes, orangutans, and chimpanzees and how representations in both popular and scholarly forums reinforced these impressions. Hochadel’s essay demonstrates that zoological gardens functioned as a site for exhibiting animals as well as a medium for displaying the natural history of humankind. Zoos thus reified the reciprocal relationships between humans and animals and nature and culture. A similar type of encounter stands at the center of Kelly Enright’s essay, which tells the story of how the image of the rhinoceros was incorporated

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doroth ee br a ntz

into American culture. Tracing the iconography of the rhino in Western culture from 1515, when Dürer created his famous woodcut of the creature, Enright shows how this pachyderm has always mystified humans. Her primary focus, however, rests on the role of rhinos in the cultural imagination of nineteenth-century America. She argues that this exotic creature revealed the public’s preference for myth over science and their predilection for locating savage wilderness abroad rather than at home. Yet rhinos remained a special case because, unlike most other animals, rhinos were never really anthropomorphized, instead retaining their status as symbol of the mythical African wilderness. Mark Barrow’s essay also deals with a myth-ridden animal in American culture—the alligator. Focusing on the multiple perceptions of alligators in American society over the past two centuries, Barrow shows how alligators have been variously viewed as fierce predators, emblems of the Florida landscape, tourist att ractions, and commodities. Counter to what we might expect, the behavior of Americans toward alligators was driven not just by fear but also by the desire to tame and profit from this beast. As a result, alligators and their natural habitats were subjected to surveillance, manipulation, and intervention; however, as Barrow demonstrates, these charismatic carnivores turned out to be rather resilient, in part due to the fact that they came to be identified with the Floridian landscape. In that sense, alligators are strangely symbolic of Americans’ attempts to impose order on nature and of how this quest for order was premised on (often contradictory) notions of economic exploitation and landscape preservation. Part 3 also looks at notions of exploitation, but it turns to the highly domesticated species of horses and dogs. How were these animals put into the service of society? Looking at specific examples, each of the essays in this section points to a different form of human manipulation. Peter Edwards examines the treatment of horses in early modern England by comparing the advice offered in the horsemanship manuals (written for an aristocratic readership) with the evidence in court records, statistics, veterinary records, and personal papers. Analyzing and juxtaposing information from all of these sources, Edwards offers a remarkable study not just of human-animal relations but also of human social relations and particularly class confl icts in early modern England. Moreover, he shows that the owners routinely put their perceived self-interest above regard for their horses’ health and welfare, even though this shortsighted practice often proved detrimental to the interests of both animal and human.

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Introduction

Turning to the special place of dogs in human society, the following two essays visit two highly politicized arenas of the twentieth century—the United States White House and Soviet space exploration. Helena Pycior’s essay describes the historical significance of “fi rst dogs” in American political culture to show how pets like Warren G. Harding’s Laddie Boy and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fala added a personal dimension to the American presidency. Examining the life stories of these two canine celebrities, Pycior offers insights into the historical construction and political exploitation of humananimal bonds, which she unpacks particularly in her descriptions of Laddie Boy’s function as host during the 1923 White House Easter egg roll and of Fala’s representative role as election-campaign personality in the 1944 presidential race. Th rough analyses of these two examples, which could of course be extended to the pets of numerous other high-ranking politicians, Pycior also makes a case for canine biographies as a tool to investigate the intricate representations of human-animal relationships. Amy Nelson is concerned with a different kind of political representation in her essay on the use of dogs in the Soviet space program. She shows how the celebrity of dogs like Laika, Belka, and Strekla underscored the Soviet Union’s technological and scientific superiority while simultaneously distracting from more disturbing aspects of the space race. In retelling the history of Soviet space exploration, Nelson depicts a peculiar example of animals being instrumentalized to overcome natural boundaries—in this case gravitational forces—and hence how they inadvertently abetted the further transgression of epistemological boundaries between nature and culture. According to Nelson, Laika and her successors generated a legacy that outlasted even the political regime that used them to mark its own sense of progress. Finally, the essays in part 4 focus on the place of animals in cities and countryside. Clay McShane and Joel Tarr examine the role played by horses in the urbanization of American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As they show, the growth of cities was heavily dependent on the power of horses. Using the metaphor of the horse as a biological machine, they explain how the equilibrium between the biological and mechanical had to be carefully negotiated in order to balance notions of economic efficiency, labor power, and humane treatment. The authors offer a detailed account of the requirements of and provisions for horses and their teamsters, who were often caught between their animals’ needs and their bosses’ demands. Nineteenth-century cities were built by horses, who transported the materials to sustain urban life and growth; they were also built for horses, however, be-

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cause many street improvements were designed specifically for them. The process of urbanization relied on the reciprocal relationship and combined efforts of humans and animals. Uwe Lübken’s essay turns to a different kind of environment. Floods have long threatened human habitats, but thus far scholars have paid litt le attention to the effects of such disasters on animals. Lübken fi rst charts the mostly man-made changes in the Ohio and Mississippi floodplains to show how they altered fragile ecosystems and animal habitats. The second part of the essay turns to actual floods and their consequences for wild and domestic animals in cities and rural areas along these rivers. As Lübken shows, the floods of the past two centuries have trapped and displaced countless animals, killing thousands of them. He claims that animals usually have even less protection than do people from high water and are thus more vulnerable to such disasters. One result of this vulnerability, according to Lübken, is the possibility that conventional human-animal bonds might be abruptly transformed when, for example, domesticated livestock and pets are suddenly forced to fend for themselves. Lübken also notes that disasters may trigger a process of “untaming” and thus promote a blurring of the distinction between wild and domesticated. The book’s fi nal essay, by Harriet Ritvo, also takes disaster as a starting point: namely, Britain’s foot-and-mouth disease epizootic in 2001, which led to the culling of tens of thousands of catt le and sheep. Some breeds of livestock, such as the Herdwick sheep of the Lake District, were particularly hard hit during this crisis due to their limited numbers and regional specificity. Over the centuries, Herdwicks had become iconic for the Cumbrian region and the appeal of its landscape. Ritvo uses this breed, known for its hearty nature, as an example of how animals embody the close interconnections between agriculture, the environment, and human perceptions of landscape. Overall, these essays show that the history of human-animal relations can take many forms because different kinds of people have engaged with a wide variety of animals in many various cultural and historical contexts. Consequently, how we study them should also reveal a variety of perspectives and methodological approaches. While that proposition sounds obvious, it is nevertheless worth noting because it has implications for both how we conceptualize animals and how we study history. With regard to animals, it means that we must always specify the sociocultural, economic, and political circumstances in which human-animal relations occur. We must also carefully chart the class, race, and gender relations that characterize human encounters with animals; and we must differentiate between diverse types 10

Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

Introduction

of animals and their particular status within human societies. We must acknowledge the fact that our relations with animals are always reciprocal. Humans do not just act on animals; they are also shaped by them. As these essays demonstrate, animals’ historical impact on human society has been multivalent because animals have affected the process of urbanization, presidential politics, cultural imagination, and the popularization of science, space exploration, and disaster relief, among other things. Such far-reaching historical influence should prompt us to ask whether culture itself is perhaps not merely a human phenomenon but a relational concept that is generated, at least in part, through our exchange with animals. After all, we often defi ne what it means to be human in contrast to animals. In other words, animals are not just constructed by us; we are also constructed through them. Our age-old engagements with animals have helped us to realize our potential as humans, but they have also demarcated the limits of our authority—both because animals have not always conformed to our ideas and because humans have never entirely agreed on how animals should be treated and interpreted. Perhaps, in keeping with Nietzsche’s idea that animals are honest because they live ahistorically, we humans should be honest enough to acknowledge that animals are part of history.

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Notes Most of the following essays were originally presented during a conference on animals and history that the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., organized at the Literaturhaus in Cologne, Germany. The essays included in this volume represent only a fraction of the more than thirty papers presented at the conference. I would like to thank all of the participants for their excellent contributions and challenging comments, many of which are reflected in the revised versions of the papers printed here. I would also like to thank my co-convener, Christof Mauch, and my former colleagues at the German Historical Institute (GHI), Bärbel Thomas and Christa Brown, for all of their organizational help. The subsequent edited collection would not have been possible without the editorial support of David Lazar and Mary Tonkinson of the GHI, Rachel Marks of the Center for Metropolitan Studies, and, most of all, the unwavering enthusiasm of our University of Virginia Press editor, Boyd Zenner, and her assistant, Angie Hogan. Moreover, the volume benefited greatly from the discerning eye of copy editor Susan Murray. Last, but not least, I also owe a special thanks to all of the contributors to this volume for being such great friends and patient colleagues. 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History for Life, trans. Adrian Collins (New York, 1957), 1. 11 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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doroth ee br a ntz 2. Ibid. 3. Paul A. B. Clarke and Andrew Linzey, eds., Political Theory and Animal Rights (London, 1990); David DeGrazia, Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status (New York, 1996); Margaret Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (New York, 1995); Gary Steiner, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy (Pitt sburgh, 2005); Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (New York, 2004). 4. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (New York, 1968). 5. Edward Payson Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London, 1906). 6. William H. Sewell Jr., “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” in The Logistics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 143. 7. Ibid., 144. 8. As the animal behaviorist Frans de Waal and others have shown, some animals have the ability to actively transform the social structures of their own social groups (see F. B. M. de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes [Baltimore, 1998]; and F. B. M. de Waal and Peter Tyack, eds., Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence, Culture, and Individualized Societies [Cambridge, Mass., 2003]). 9. I have discussed this in more detail in “The Natural Space of Modernity: A Transatlantic Perspective on (Urban) Environmental History,” in The Historian’s Nature: Comparative Approaches to Environmental History, ed. Ursula Lehmkuhl and Hermann Wellenreuther, 195–225 (Oxford, 2007). 10. Juliet Clutton-Brock, A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals (New York, 1999). 11. Dorothee Brantz, “The Domestication of Empire: Human-Animal Relations at the Intersection of Civilization and Acclimatization in the Nineteenth Century,” in A Cultural History of Animals: The Age of Empire, 1800–1920, ed. Kathleen Kete, 73–93 (Oxford, 2007). 12. J. Donald Hughes, What Is Environmental History? (Cambridge, U.K., 2006), 3. 13. Harriet Ritvo, “History and Animal Studies,” Society and Animals 10.4 (2002): 4. 14. On the role of animals in colonial expansion, see Alfred Cosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900–1900 (New York, 1986); Alfred Cosby, Germs, Seeds, and Animals: Studies in Ecological History (Armonk, 1994); and Elinor Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (New York, 1994). On animals as natural resources, see, for example, William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991); and on hunting as part of environmental transformations, see Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History (New York, 2000). 12 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

Introduction

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15. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1987); and Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (New York, 1983). 16. Harriet Ritvo, “Animal Planet,” Environmental History 9 (April 2004): 205. 17. For a bibliography on animal-related scholarship, see htt p://ecoculturalgroup .msu.edu/bibliography.htm. 18. Th is Web site can be accessed at www.h-net.org/~animal. It was established by Susan Pearson and Brett Mizelle following the 2005 Cologne conference that generated the essays included in this volume. 19. Erica Fudge, “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), 6. 20. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 19. 21. William Cronon, introduction to Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1996), 25.

13 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

PART I

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An Anthropological History of Animals and the Environment

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Does “The Animal” Exist? Toward a Theory of Social Life with Animals

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susa n j. pe a r son a n d mary weismantel

Animals still elude us. As numerous conference panels, symposia, books, book series, and academic journals attest, the field of animal studies has become an extraordinarily rich and productive one; yet, despite all our efforts, the animals of our scholarship too often figure only as “objects in human culture,” containers of human projections, and as useful tools for drawing social boundaries. When we try to imagine them otherwise, to see them in and of themselves—we fail; ultimately, we fi nd ourselves strangely condemned to replicate, in slightly different terms, the long-standing opposition between nature and culture.1 Caught between the Scylla of anthropomorphism and the Charybdis of anthropocentrism, can scholars ever regard the animal as more than a symbol?2 We believe it to be possible, but the obstacles to doing so are numerous and formidable. The field of animal studies currently suffers from an inadequate theorization of animals as historical actors, as well as of the social world within which animals and humans live and interact. We seek not the replacement of imagined animals with edible ones, but rather a new theoretical formulation that incorporates symbolic approaches with social and material history. As an anthropologist and a historian, we seek an interdisciplinary approach in which insights from the fields of ethnography and geography can help to refocus attention on the spatiotemporal aspects of human-animal interactions. 17

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A Philosophical Question: Does “The Animal” Exist?

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Without a Trace; or, Are Animals Historical Beings? The challenge of writing animals into history is a multidimensional one. It is ontological, a question of imagining animal being. It is epistemological, a discursive dilemma constituted by the nonverbal nature of our communication with animals. But it is also methodological. Erica Fudge recounts her disappointment when, in the course of her research for a history of animals, she found that “they had no voices and left no textual traces.”3 Ultimately, the problem and its solution are historical: limitations that appear to be intrinsic to the animal condition are in fact historically and culturally specific. These three dimensions are inextricably linked, for the methodological difficulty of documenting animal lives is taken as evidence of an ontological problem inherent in animals themselves, and hence as epistemological grounds for excluding animals from history. Language has long been used to distinguish humans as the sole possessors of culture, thereby relegating all other animals to the realm of nature. Th is point was famously articulated by that exemplar of metaphysical dualism René Descartes. For Descartes, animals’ lack of language demonstrated their lack of consciousness and thus of suffering and soul. In this circular logic, animals’ inability to express consciousness is offered as conclusive proof that they do not have any.4 That scholars studying animals regard their subjects as having “no voices and no traces” is, then, more than a methodological impediment: the inability to signify is a condition of animality itself. Th is ontological defect writes animals out of history, for language—connected by Descartes and others to rationality, consciousness, and subjectivity—has been the established prerequisite for being a subject in and of history. The anthropologists Jack Goody and Ian Watt, for instance, consider history itself the product of linguistic development. “Man’s biological evolution shades into prehistory when he becomes a language-using animal; add writing, and history proper begins.” The scholarly study of these stages is, they contend, respectively divided among zoology, anthropology, and sociology. In this scheme, animals and the nonliterate cannot participate in history, for they are unable to objectify the world and the passage of time. Oral cultures have the absolute time of memory and myth; only the literate have “historical sensibility.”5 Instead of consciousness, animals have instinct; instead of history, animals have the “time” of genetic inheritance. Johannes Fabian, in his devastating critique of such logocentric schema, identifies their central flaw as the “denial of coevalness” to those who, in fact, coexist with us within the same temporal frame. 18 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

Does “The Animal” Exist?

His focus was on anthropology’s relationship to the primitive; his point, however, also illuminates history’s relationship to animals.6

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Animals and Humans: Never Quite Themselves Just as animals have been denied agency in Western history, so has the intellectual category of animal been marginalized in Western philosophy, where for centuries it has constituted the suppressed core of what it means to be human. Contemporary theoretical discussions about the animal’s central role in the development of humanist philosophy, however, have not led to a new conceptualization of animals as part of human history. Instead, animals once again appear only to disappear as we look through them at ourselves.7 At the heart of Western culture, as Giorgio Agamben has written, is an “anthropological machine,” a set of philosophical assumptions that produces man by delineating the animal as that which man surpasses through spirit, evolution, reason, language, will.8 The opposite is likewise true: in her study of medieval animals, for example, Joyce Salisbury fi nds that “people’s defi nition of animals really amounted to a defi nition of what it meant to be human.”9 Ironically, then, the more that humans have attempted to draw clear lines around themselves as a separate order of creation, the more dependent on animality they have become. “Humans,” as Erica Fudge writes, “need animals in order to be human.”10 In recent decades, these complacent visions of the human and the animal have been partly dislodged by postmodern revisions of Enlightenment categories. Fudge, for example, asserts that putt ing animals into history is part of a larger posthumanist project of reconsidering the human subject and its special status.11 No longer the speaker of language, man is now spoken by it; no longer the agent of history and power, man is produced by them; no longer the producer of knowledge, “man” is now its product; no longer the master of animals, man is dependent on them to understand himself. In short, as Cary Wolfe writes, “the ‘human,’ we now know, is not now, and never was, itself.”12 The main task of postmodern and posthumanist philosophy is not, then, to “seek new—more effective or more authentic—articulations” of the human-animal divide but rather, according to Agamben, “to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that—within man—separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness.”13 If animal has been a primary category of alterity within Western culture, and if difference has been the main source of inequality and oppression, then Agamben, Fudge, and others glimpse ethical and even utopian possibilities in the abandonment of the anthropological machine, its levers and gears left to rust in posthistorical time. 19 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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But although Fudge suggests that scholars who practice “holistic history” (that is, those who use the study of animals as a means to explore the contingency, constructedness, and ultimate emptiness of traditional Western conceptions of the human subject) go beyond the animal-as-symbol paradigm, it is not altogether clear that this is the case. Even in poststructuralist psychoanalytic accounts of human identity, animals are often denied the same degree of subjectivity as humans. Lacan, for example, claims that they are unable to leave traces. Animals leave their tracks (which are used to identify and classify them according to the same schemata that separate instinct and agency, nature and culture, and man and animals), but because they merely generate these signs rather than manipulating them, animals are not their masters but their subjects. Humans, Lacan asserts, though likewise constituted by language, can come to control the process of signification in ways that animals never can.14 Radical posthumanists, however, question the desirability of these human traits. Deleuze and Guattari, searching for means to undermine the oedipal self, claim that the animal represents the best kind of alterity, what they call “minoritarian.”15 They celebrate the animal as without individual identity, existing only as a “pack,” freed from the fi lial strictures of modernity; and they exhort their readers to enter into “becoming-animal,” a state that “lacks a subject distinct from itself.” To experience the animal is to experience deterritorialization, in which the self is overwhelmed and dissolved, for the pack “throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel.”16 Their animal is not a flesh-and-blood creature but a symbol of radical Otherness. According to Steve Baker, animals “for Deleuze and Guattari, seem to operate more as a device of writing—albeit a device which initiated its own forms of political practice—than as living beings whose conditions of life were of direct concern to the writers.”17 Even in postmodernist accounts, then, the category animal is essentially an empty one, fi lled only with the shadows of another abstraction—human. Defi ned primarily as a negative, a lack, or an absence, the animal of both modern and postmodern Western discourse remains lifeless, a poor substitute for animals themselves. But as anthropologists have long been aware, the totalizing sensibility of the Mosaic tradition, with its premise that God gave Man dominion over the beasts, is far from universal. Two of the hoariest puzzles of midcentury ethnography, totemism and cannibalism, arose precisely when Western researchers tried to understand moralities and ontologies in which the divide between animals and humans was not so absolute. The cannibal—a subject of enduring fascination and revulsion in Europe, 20

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Does “The Animal” Exist?

and the very trope of the savage—has long been used to defi ne a state of moral degradation and thus functions as a symbolic foil for Western sensibilities. Th is image of a subhuman figure who violates the most deeply held and universal of human values is nothing more than a fiction produced by and for Europeans, just as some postcolonial scholars have argued—but not because, as the latter assume, cannibalism never existed. Instead, the problem lies in the misperception of cannibal logic as amoral rather than as an expression of the radically different moral universe that arises when no animal/human divide exists. In so-called civilized societies, to eat an animal is morally neutral, to eat a human abhorrent; animals are entitled neither to life nor to dignity after death. There is a striking analogy with the crime of rape, which historically could not occur if the victim was nonwhite or enslaved: no criminality attached to the bodily violation of so abject a social figure. Cannibalism is abhorrent because it too involves a bodily violation, one to which no human—but any animal—can be subjected. In contrast, for foraging and hunting peoples, who view animals as the moral equals of humans, the treatment of the dead poses different questions. The bodies of dead animals, like those of humans, are attended by rituals and protocols; the bodies of dead humans, like those of animals, may upon occasion be eaten. The practice of cannibalism emerges from the belief that a death can be recuperated only by the act of incorporating the victim into one’s own body—in other words, the act of eating confers meaning on the death. Since a human life is not considered intrinsically more valuable than an animal’s in these communities, treating a human corpse as one treats an animal’s—for example, by consuming it—becomes sacramental rather than horrifying. Indeed, as with animals, this act may be seen as a reverent gesture that redeems the horror of death.18 Totemism also illuminates ontological systems in which the categories of human and animal intermingle. In this belief system, human groups represent and distinguish themselves from other human groups by identifying with an animal species. Th is identification is not simply symbolic; rather, it is experienced as deeply embodied and inherently social.19 One’s own body and self is substantively identical with that of one’s totem animal and therefore unlike that of different clans.20 Some animals and some people—but not all—are kin. The line between species is less important, in other words, than the line between social groups that include both humans and nonhumans. In these practices, no single animal can be opposed to humanity, leaving us to conclude—as Judith Butler did about woman—that the category of animal does not exist. Even in American history, as Virginia Anderson’s recent 21

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work demonstrates, the abstract division between humans and animals has not always been as salient as the relationship of certain animals to certain people. That both catt le and deer were animals mattered less, for example, to eighteenth-century Native Americans and English colonists than did the fact that one was a form of property, an extension of colonial powers, and the other was not. These juridical, economic, and social distinctions undermined any categorical similarity. In short, the philosophical question, “Does the animal exist?” demands historical and ethnographic investigation.

Historical and Ethnographic Answers: Toward a Theory of Social Life with Animals

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Past scholarship on animals has addressed “animals not as literal living organisms—food, prey, possessions, or companions to man—but as symbols, ideas, or images.”21 Now, however, we propose that some of those disavowed animal topics be allowed back into the fold. Without rejecting the symbolic, we call for a materialist study of animals as tools; as energy sources; and as concentrated, heritable, and reproducible forms of wealth. In addition, we seek a social-geographic account of the shared and segregated spaces occupied by humans and animals within particular social formations. We urge scholars to recover animals’ physical presence in social life; to embed that social life within political economy; and, fi nally, to plot the spatial dimensions of human-animal relations.

The Social Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous assertion that totem animals are “good to think [with]” (rather than merely “good to eat,” as Bronislaw Malinowski had claimed) was not a comment on animals at all but a wry challenge to contemporary Western views on so-called primitive philosophies.22 Its effect among scholars, however, was to remove animals from the realm of the material to that of the symbolic, where they remain today. Our relationship to animals is, however, neither wholly symbolic nor wholly material; rather, it is profoundly social. The “social,” as Durkheim defi ned it, is a domain of action and interaction that is neither biological nor psychological, neither wholly material nor individual. The social, he wrote, comprises “ways of acting, thinking, and feeling external to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him.”23 In his emphasis on the coercive character of the social, Durkheim removes us from the sphere of pure human “agency” or “will,” from that 22

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Does “The Animal” Exist?

fictional world in which humans, but not animals, always manipulate their traces. Far from materialist, Durkheim’s concept of the collective unconscious underlines the importance he gave to symbolic processes; however, these are deeply imbricated with social activities, and mutually constituted by and constitutive of them. Our ideas about animals—such as the ontological status that philosophers have assigned to animals—are not arbitrary but originate in the historically specific social organization of human-animal relations. Our very concepts, and the processes by which we arrive at them, are therefore susceptible to study through the methodologies of social history and anthropology. Consider the famous anthropological example of pigs among the Kaulong of New Guinea. According to Jane Goodale, “the Kaulong consider pigs and humans to occupy a single continuum of existence . . . both hav[e] souls in which the essence of social being is to be found.”24 Some individuals are able to live within the bounds of the social, eschewing violence and sexual predation, and contributing to the collective life of their communities; others act like wild animals—unpredictable, dangerous, and impossible to integrate within the social. For the latter, death comes early. The att itude of New Guinean tribes toward pigs derives from the fact that these animals live with, and like, people. Female pigs are brought into the human family while still piglets and are raised in close physical and emotional contact with women. Anthropologists could not help but notice. Even Roy Rappaport’s rigorously scientific study of ecology and pig husbandry among the Tsembaga—Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People—includes descriptions of pigs following their mistresses to the gardens, tied to them not by a rope but by a bond of affection. These pigs, he tells us, lived inside villagers’ homes, “separated from the living quarters only by a rail fence through which the animal . . . thrust its snout for scratching” by doting owners, who petted, talked to, and fed “choice morsels” to them.25

Material Traces If we fail to consider animals’ material lives, however, our understanding of these emotional relations remains incomplete. The Tsembaga do not confuse pigs with humans; nor do they regard them as pets. Pigs are raised to be butchered and eaten. Th is combination violates categories of companion animal/ barnyard animal that we use in the West: pigs, although beloved members of the household, are valued not because of their similarities to humans but because of their unique economic role in the community. Rappaport notes the important “contribution to Tsembaga subsistence” that pigs make “by 23

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eating garbage and human feces[,] . . . keeping residential areas clean [and] convert[ing] wastes into materials that may be utilized by their masters.”26 More crucially, the emotional intensity of the pig/human relationship culminates in rituals in which pigs are fi rst feted and then slaughtered. On these occasions, pigs reward the owners who have lavished attention on them by providing, through their bodies, physiological, social, and spiritual benefits: they sustain the living with meat, demonstrate the wealth and status of ambitious families, and constitute offerings to the ancestors—thus performing multiple necessary functions, the value of which is enhanced because they require the sacrifice of cherished animal companions. Rappaport documents in great detail the impact that pigs have on life in New Guinea—all forms of life, including the biotic health of the environment and the spiritual well-being of the human community. In reaffi rming his point that history is also made through actions other than utterance and writing, we use empirical evidence to challenge one of the longest-held and most fervently argued distinctions between the animal and the human. For, regardless of their cognitive capacities, animals have everywhere left traces of their presence within social spheres conventionally conceptualized as human, here as well as in New Guinea; the onus is not on the animal to prove its capacities but rather on the historian to follow the evidence.27 These traces are often erased, hidden, or disguised, either through ideology or through social geographies that separate humans and animals, consumers and laborers, urban and rural, pleasure and pain. Indeed, as we argue below, such separations characterize certain historical periods—such as our own—and underwrite the very ontologies that deny an animal is a social being. While archaeologists regard animal bodies—their bones, skin, horns, and hooves—as important sources of information, historians have consigned them to the realm of natural history, to be interpreted as evidence not of actions and experiences but of immutable laws and natural forces acting upon animals as upon the earth from which their remains emerge. We instead claim these material traces as evidence of a social history, one of specific and temporally varied interactions among multiple species. As the geographers Chris Wilbert and Chris Philo put it, “humans are always, and have always been, enmeshed in social relations with animals . . . animals are undoubtedly constitutive of human societies in all sorts of ways.”28 Th is is a history within which humans play a dominant but not an exclusive role; and it is one that, like all histories, can be recuperated only in partial, fragmentary, and sometimes contradictory forms.

24 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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Does “The Animal” Exist?

The economic and social history of the world was once written in terms of animals—not symbolic animals but working ones, or animals that served as humans’ prey. Largely discredited except in certain obscure corners of the academy, this venerable tradition of historical studies defi ned animals in terms of their instrumental capacities: as tools, forms of wealth, and sources of energy. “Without the horse,” claims one recent contributor to the history of early Western Europe, “human history would have been entirely different.”29 A well-known (and, to some minds, dubious) theory offered by Lynn White some years earlier holds that the establishment of feudalism on the European continent can be traced to the invention of the stirrup. In White’s analysis, as in the medieval Europe he studied, animals were fundamental forms of technology.30 Historians of later periods have also recognized the horse as critical to the development of industrialism and the transportation networks that made possible the urban expansion so central to capitalism.31 Scholars working in the burgeoning field of environmental history often incorporate animals into their stories of ecological change; as a result, they demonstrate how ecology and human society are historically and analytically inseparable.32 Thus while environmental historians incorporate animals as part of a story about the importance of “nature,” they simultaneously disrupt the nature/culture binary on which distinctions between animals and humans—and between disciplines—have traditionally rested. In anthropology, the story of animals as essential components of economic and technological regimes has also had its day: an earlier generation of scholars thought it was important that sub-Saharan Africa could be divided into areas where catt le could be raised and areas that were infested by tsetse fly; that the introduction of the horse into North America stimulated the sudden efflorescence of Great Plains hunting societies, such as the Blackfoot and the Crow; or that camellid pastoralism in the Andes provided not only meat, fiber for textiles, and cargo transport for Inca armies but also dung for cooking fuel at altitudes above the tree line. Many anthropologists now affect disdain for these once-famous accounts of animals in history, but one small branch of animal studies continues to thrive: taphonomy—that is, the study of faunal remains—which is used by archaeologists to reconstruct the economies, ecologies, and social life of prehistoric and historic communities. In the work of these highly specialized scholars, one can fi nd not only ample data about animals in the past but also a sustained focus on political economy that has become increasingly rare elsewhere in the discipline of animal studies as a whole.

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Political Economy An exception is found in Britain, where the materialist tradition is exemplified in works such as the important collection What Is an Animal? edited by the anthropologist Tim Ingold. In that volume, Richard Tapper argues that we should think of our relationships with animals as labor relationships. He proposes the integration of animals into classic Marxian categories by substituting the “nature of human-animal relations of production” for the more familiar “relations of production.” Doing so not only locates human-animal relationships within social organization but also identifies these relations as forces driving historical change.33 Th is broad conceptual framework allows us to unite symbolic analyses with political economy under the single rubric of a mode of animal-human organization. One might similarly consider the importance of animals within European categories of social class, where the putatively biological basis of human difference was instantiated in animals, making members of the same species into a blue-ribbon show dog or a mangy, homeless mutt, a pedigreed athlete owned by royalty or a broken-down cart horse. While it has been documented that animals, like humans, have occupied particular class strata throughout most of European history, this has nonetheless been insufficiently theorized in animal studies; so, too, has the spatial mapping of human-animal relations.34

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Space We look to the spatial as an instantiation of the social and thus as a methodological solution to the problem of the absent animal voice. As cultural and social geographers long ago observed, spatial arrangements map the social in both concrete and symbolic terms; reciprocal interactions as well as power structures and hierarchies are spatialized.35 Geographers have lately begun to apply this critical insight to the spatial organization of interspecies relationships.36 A recent study of English colonialism in North America demonstrates how attention to space can illuminate the presence of animals, imagined and real. Virginia Anderson’s compelling Creatures of Empire puts pigs and cows at the center of the unfolding drama of seventeenth-century Indian-English relations. As Anderson shows, English sett lers’ practice of animal husbandry dictated the course of colonization and became the motive for all westward expansion. These two species appear as willful social actors: never fully under their owners’ control, nominally English cows plundered Native Ameri-

26 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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Does “The Animal” Exist?

can corn plots and wandered into the no-man’s land of the forests, only to be killed, accidentally and intentionally, by indigenous hunters. Often, confl icts over animals brought sett lers and Native Americans into court, where radically different visions of the natural world and the nature of property were thrown into sharp relief. To the colonists, their pigs and cows literally transformed the landscape, representing civilized forms of social organization and modes of production; to Indians, English pigs and cows were both a physical nuisance and a symbol of encroachment. In a very real sense, these relationships caused countless daily frictions and the mounting bad faith that form the backdrop for early American history, an insight that becomes available only when the historian places animals and humans in their New World spaces—the grazing commons, the corn plot, and the forest.37 Anderson’s analysis suggests that rather than asking whether animals have agency, we should be asking who the social actors are in any given situation. In questioning the primacy of agency in history, animal studies draws on the insights of historians of the environment and of slavery. Linda Nash, for example, urges fellow environmental historians to drop their efforts to show that nature has agency and instead to “think about agency in altogether different terms.”38 Similarly, Walter Johnson points out that “the term ‘agency’ smuggles a notion of the universality of a liberal notion [sic] of selfhood . . . right into the middle of a conversation about slavery against which that supposedly natural (at least for white men) condition was originally defined.”39 The same can be said of animals, who have long been denied this putatively human force, the motor of history—and then held accountable for their lack. Instead of understanding agency as a transcendent feature of being—one we can see anywhere if only we look hard enough—we would do better to ask how agency has been defi ned historically, and how agentive powers have been constructed and distributed through social formations. Animals have affected the societies in which they lived by means of their individual presence within social geographies as well as through the collective needs and capacities of particular species. Because of their often degraded and subjugated status, their ability to effect change has often been sharply curtailed; however, the same is self-evidently true of human actors in many circumstances. Rather than a rationale for ignoring nonhuman actors in our paradigms of what a society is and who its constituents are, the uneven distribution of agency should instead be taken as a defi ning quality that differentiates one society from another.

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Our Animals, Our Scholarship At the beginning of this essay, we proposed that the barriers to fully incorporating animals into history were variously ontological, epistemological, methodological, and historical. To overcome the ontological and epistemological limitations that posit animals as speechless creatures outside of time, we have suggested a methodology based on a renewed concept of the social, integrating its symbolic, political-economic, and spatial dimensions. But what of the historical barriers, not least of which are the millennia of dualistic thought that precludes the inclusion of animals in human concepts of social life and historical narrative? It is not merely the weight of tradition, however, that constrains our vision; rather, the peculiarities of our own social life with animals at this historical moment prevent us from seeing animals’ tracks, traces, bodies, and actions. By reflexively considering our own historically constituted relationship to animals, in other words, we may fi nally be able to escape the epistemological trap that binds both animals and our vision of them. To illustrate, we offer a fi nal contrast between an earlier society famous for its intimate and binding relationships between humans and animals, and the animal-human political economy of our own time: a brave new world in which working animals for the fi rst time nearly vanish from view but remain critical nonetheless to the operation of the global economy. E. E. EvansPritchard’s ethnography of North African pastoralists in the early twentieth century, The Nuer, presents an argument of unsurpassed elegance for the integration of spatial, economic, and symbolic analyses in interpreting the relationship of animals and humans. Among the many tomes produced by British structural-functionalists in the 1930s and 1940s, few are as widely read today as The Nuer, and few chapters within that book are as warmly remembered as the fi rst, “Interest in Catt le,” with its line drawings illustrating catt le coloration and children’s clay cows; lengthy transcriptions of praise songs to cows addressed as “thou pride of Nyawal” and “my black-rumped white ox”; and memorable descriptions of a “habitually morose” young man suddenly becoming animated as he speaks of his “fi ne ox . . . with a large white splash on its back,” and “throwing up his arms to show you how its horns are trained.”40 The chapter unfolds a series of propositions about the relationship between the Nuer and their catt le, asserting fi rst that “the Nuer is the parasite of the cow” because of the tribe’s total economic, technological, and nutritional dependence on the cow, then reversing the terms and proposing instead that “the cow is the parasite of the Nuer, whose lives are spent in ensuring its welfare.” Evans-Pritchard goes on to say: “They build byres, 28 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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Does “The Animal” Exist?

kindle fi res, and clean kraals for its comfort; move from villages to camps, from camp to camp, and from camps back to villages, for its health; defy wild beasts for its protection; and fashion ornaments for its adornment. It lives its gentle, indolent, sluggish life thanks to the Nuer’s devotion. In truth the relationship is symbiotic: catt le and men sustain life by their reciprocal relationship to one another. In this intimate symbiotic relationship men and beasts form a single community of the closest kind.”41 Here, one particular species becomes so closely intertwined with a human group as to render the two inseparable not just in daily life and community ritual but in consciousness as well. The intellectual importance of catt le to the Nuer, like that of pigs to the Tsembaga, is demonstrated indirectly by the fact that both Evans-Pritchard and Rappaport were pushed to write about the animals by their informants. As Evans-Pritchard writes, with his customary dry and incisive wit: “They are always talking about their beasts. I used sometimes to despair that I never discussed anything with the young men but livestock and girls, and even the subject of girls led inevitably to that of catt le. Start on whatever subject I would, and approach it from whatever angle, we would soon be speaking of cows and oxen, heifers and steers, rams and sheep, he-goats and she-goats, calves and lambs and kids. . . . Nuer tend to defi ne all social processes and relationships in terms of catt le. Their social idiom is a bovine idiom.”42 Th is all-pervasive presence of the animal in social life and thus in the intellectual life of human actors throws into stark relief the spatial organization of our own late-capitalist society. Largely disconnected from the working animals on whom so many of our products and so much of our food depends, and in regular contact only with pets and zoo animals, the human-animal relationship in the modern West is both brutally mechanistic and highly symbolic. If our survey of earlier societies has revealed a contrast between the fluid and reciprocal relations that governed human-animal interactions among hunters and tribal pastoralists and the rigidly hierarchized structures of urban and rural Europe, where animals and people might be vagrants, laborers, or elites, then the class structure pertaining to animals today—like that of humans—has reached a dichotomization previously unimaginable.43 The contemporary global economy produces social extremes, condemning some animals to the naked coercion and social isolation imposed by modern factory farming, while consigning others to the affective discipline and inescapable intimacy of the bourgeois home.44 Hidden behind closed doors and segregated from towns and cities, the processes of raising, slaughtering, and rendering animals into products are industrial and impersonal. Our relationship with these animals thus mirrors 29

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society’s spatial and economic organization. The industrialization of farming and its attendant economies of scale have removed from sight the evidence of our intense dependence on animals. Recent studies estimate that between 9 and 10 million animals die each year as a part of food production in the United States (of those millions, more than 90 percent are chickens); these constitute 98 percent of all the animals that humans have contact with, making the rest—including companion animals, hunted animals, and laboratory animals—a statistically insignificant 2 percent.45 The vast size of factory farms and animal-rendering facilities, along with their location on the urban and social peripheries, is part of a process that corresponds not just to industrialization but also to larger mechanisms of modernization, such as the rationalization and compartmentalization of space into specialized domains.46 Factory farming reduces animals to a state of abjection that justly outrages animal-rights activists and that represents unprecedented physical abuse. Our attention here, however, is on how this particular spatial arrangement disguises animals’ instrumental significance to humans and thus causes us to misunderstand both what animals are and who we ourselves are. The notion that we can recover animals primarily as symbols is an artifact not only of the centuries-old philosophical tradition discussed above but also of the organization of the human-animal nexus in modern postindustrial societies. The animals that appear to populate the industrialized world are those in the zoo, the household pets of the affluent, and the ubiquitous anthropomorphized creatures of children’s videos, books, and toys—creatures that John Berger calls the “animals of the mind,” which “have been co-opted into the family and into the spectacle.”47 The animals visible in the contemporary world really do serve a function that is almost exclusively symbolic; they neither work nor actively participate in human institutions and communities. Nevertheless, if the “work” performed by modern animals is almost wholly symbolic, this should be seen as a historical phenomenon, the development of which is linked to the same forces that generated the epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical schemas described above.48 The irony is that as animals’ symbolic importance makes them the focus of growing popular and scholarly interest, it simultaneously imposes severe limitations on how we can perceive the animals of the past. If we conceptualize our society in its spatial entirety, rather than just in terms of what we see in our daily lives, the picture changes dramatically; so, too, does our understanding of the animal. The factory farm becomes a defi ning feature of our time and place—and we remember that the animals whose flesh we eat, skins we wear, and bones we use as pet food are actors within our economy, albeit as invisible to us as the 30

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Does “The Animal” Exist?

Mexican immigrant workers who slaughter and process their remains.49 The shocking journalistic accounts of what happens within these facilities, which document unparalleled cruelty to animals both in print and on fi lm, suggest that these sites ought to be closely investigated and rigorously theorized by animal-studies scholars.50 On the other side of the coin, twenty-fi rst-century pets need to be retheorized as economic actors of crucial importance to the global economy. Reports on the pet industry and its excesses—the boutique stores, restaurants, and nail salons—focus on the hapless consumer as a figure of ridicule, an individual with absurdly overdeveloped tastes and desires.51 Missing from this picture, of course, is the enormous apparatus of advertising and sales that is constantly creating new customers. It is no accident that the pet, like the “tween,” has suddenly emerged from centuries of relative obscurity to become a ravenous consumer with ever-expanding appetites and newly defi ned needs. If the laboring animal has now been perfectly subordinated to the needs of his employer—his capacity for voluntary social engagement destroyed, his physical capabilities reduced to a single substance extracted with nightmarish efficiency—the consuming animal is undergoing a similarly totalizing transformation. If, in our ruminations on the animal, we can successfully theorize transformations such as these in all their symbolic, spatial, and political-economic ramifications, then we will surely understand a great deal more about our animals, about ourselves, and about the multiple social histories of animal-human interaction that have brought us to this point in history.

(In)Conclusions While philosophers and theorists have used the category of animal to alternately construct and deconstruct the category of human, in writing a history of the human-animal relationship, more empirically minded scholars have tended to adopt one of two sharply dichotomous views. On the one hand, traditional approaches in both history and anthropology are overly economistic and technological, treating animals solely as sources of wealth, labor, or commodities; on the other hand, current culturalist approaches often veer toward the other extreme, viewing animals almost exclusively as sources of symbolic meaning and never recognizing their independent existence. What these approaches lack, we feel, is a developed concept of the social: the entire lived experience of quotidian and extraordinary interactions—embodied and imaginary, material and symbolic—that occur within space and in 31

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particular locations, and involve humans and animals in multiple forms of engagement and exchange. By placing humans and animals together within this active social world, we seek to resituate them within an amplified understanding of social life. By concentrating on the animal as an intellectual symbol, researchers may preclude even an adequate understanding of this symbolic role, since they miss the opportunity to fully conceptualize the dialectical processes by which symbols arise out of lived experience, in all its social, geographic, and material complexity. We end with an image from Evans-Pritchard: young Nuer men, he tells us, owners of a single ox, would tether it outside their tent at night, and pin open the door so that they might catch glimpses of its shape against the night sky, fi lling their dreams. Everything in their lives encouraged them to see their ox as the embodiment of beauty and wealth, the source of human power, and also as a comember of “a corporate community with solidarity of interests.”52 If we can, in theorizing the animal in the social, begin to put the laboring, consuming, living, dying animal back into our own imaginings—if we can fi nd and follow animals’ traces—we may begin to realize that the fiction of a traceless past arises from another contemporary fiction: the one that says we live in a postindustrial and postagricultural society.

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Notes 1. Christine Kenyon Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (Aldershot, U.K., 2001), 1. 2. We are not the fi rst, nor will we be the last, to note (or lament) that much scholarship in animal studies focuses on the symbolic rather than the material; we simply add to the chorus. See, for example, Erica Fudge’s introduction to Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Fudge (Urbana, Ill., 2004); and Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert’s introduction to Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations, ed. Philo and Wilbert (London, 2000). 3. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke, U.K., 2000), 2. 4. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis, 1993), 32. For more on the importance of language to defi ning the human-animal divide, see John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” in About Looking, by Berger (1980; repr., New York, 1991), 6; Tim Ingold, “The Animal in the Study of Humanity,” in What Is an Animal? ed. Ingold, 84–99 (London, 1988); Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), 78–85; Duane Rumbaugh, “Primate 32 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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Does “The Animal” Exist? Language and Cognition: Common Ground,” in Humans and Other Animals, ed. Arien Mack, 310–20 (Columbus, Ohio, 1999); Matt hew Senior, “HAIR’When the Beasts Spoke’: Animal Speech and Classical Reason in Descartes and La Fontaine,” in Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, ed. Jennifer Ham and Senior, 61–84 (New York, 1997); R. W. Serjeantson, “The Passions and Animal Language, 1540–1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 425–44; Brian Cummings, “Pliny’s Literate Elephant and the Idea of Animal Language in Renaissance Thought,” in Renaissance Beasts, ed. Fudge, 164–85; Cary Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal,” in Zoontologies, ed. Wolfe, 1–57 (Minneapolis, 2003). For the influence of Cartesian dualism on the question of animal rights, see Gary L. Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (Philadelphia, 1995), 8–10. 5. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Goody (Cambridge, U.K., 1968), 27, 34. For a recent reassertion of this position on the relationship between alphabetic literacy and historicity, see Jack Goody, The Power of the Written Tradition (Washington, D.C., 2000), 63–85. On the idea that humans are distinct from animals by virtue of having both culture and consciousness of the past, see Bernard Williams, “Prologue: Making Sense of Humanity,” in The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines, ed. James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna, 13–23 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991); and David Premack and Ann James Premack, “Why Animals Have Neither Culture nor History,” in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold, 350–65 (London, 1994). 6. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983), 1–35. For an application of Fabian’s idea to the discovery of the New World (which also demonstrates the interpenetration of the writing of history and the writing of anthropology), see Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor, 2003), 125–69. We take the denial of coevalness to be the problem to which Erica Fudge refers when she says that animals do not fit the usual periodizations based on human experience (e.g., dogs had no Renaissance) (see Fudge, “A Left-Handed Blow,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels, 3–18 [Indianapolis, 2002]). For a discussion of thought about the immanence of animals in Western philosophy, see Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, 2004), particularly his discussion of Heidegger’s claim that animals are in the world but do not have a world. For more on Heidegger and animal immanence/human transcendence, see William McNeill, “Life beyond the Organism,” in Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, ed. H. Peter Steeves, 197–248 (Albany, 1999). Like Agamben, McNeill tries to fi nd some small opening in Heidegger for a nonessentialist description of humans and animals, though given Heidegger’s insistence that the animal is “poor in the world” while the human is “world-forming,” this is a difficult proposition. 33 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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susa n j. pea r son a nd m a ry w eism a ntel 7. Th is dynamic brings to mind Marjorie Garber’s comment in her book on cross-dressing that, despite the growing scholarly interest in transvestites “as a sign of the constructedness of gender categories,” the overwhelming “tendency on the part of many critics has been to look through rather than at the cross-dresser, to turn away from a close encounter with the transvestite, and to want to subsume that figure within one of the two traditional genders. To elide and erase—or to appropriate the transvestite for particular political and critical aims” (Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety [New York, 1992], 9). 8. Agamben, The Open, 92. See also Bruno Latour’s notion of the “modern constitution” in his We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). 9. Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (New York, 1994), 168. Similarly, Jennifer Ham and Matt hew Senior argue that “the artistic and historic reinvention of humanness has often involved a return to animality” (introduction to Animal Acts, ed. Ham and Senior, 1–8, esp. 5). 10. Fudge, Perceiving Animals, 2, 4. 11. For more on this, see Wolfe, introduction to Zoontologies, ed. Wolfe, ix–xxiii. 12. Ibid., xiii. 13. Agamben, The Open, 92. 14. Th is description of Lacan is taken from Jacques Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded,” in Zoontologies, ed. Wolfe, 121–38. Derrida objects to this distinction, claiming that “traces erase (themselves), like everything else, but the structure of the trace is such that it cannot be in anyone’s power to erase it” (138). 15. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1987), 232–309. 16. Deleuze and Guattari are not the only theorists to appropriate the “animal” in order to critique contemporary society. The Massachusett s Museum of Contemporary Art recently mounted an exhibition inspired by Deleuze and Guatt ari’s work. (see Nato Thompson, ed., Becoming Animal: Contemporary Art in the Animal Kingdom [North Adams, Mass., 2005]). For an examination of how eco-anarchists appropriate animality without critiquing its constitution as radically Other, see Chris Wilbert, “Anti-Th is—Against-That: Resistances along a Human—NonHuman Axis,” in Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance, ed. Joanne Sharp et al., 238–55 (London, 2000). For a feminist use of Deleuze and Guattari, see Lynda Birke and Luciana Parisi, “Animals, Becoming,” in Animal Others, ed. Steeves, 55–73; and for feminist uses of animal “otherness,” see Marian Scholtmeijer, “The Power of Otherness: Animals in Women’s Fiction,” in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, ed. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, 231–62 (Durham, N.C., 1995). For a less postmodern, but no less utopian, appropriation of animal otherness, see Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, D.C., 1996).

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Does “The Animal” Exist? 17. Steve Baker, “What Does Becoming-Animal Look Like?” in Representing Animals, ed. Rothfels, 95. 18. Beth Conklin, Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society (Austin, 2001). 19. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston, 1963); Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (1912; repr., London, 1964). For a particularly rich discussion of these issues, see Tim Ingold, “From Trust to Domination: An Alternative History of HumanAnimal Relations,” in Animals and Human Societies: Changing Perspectives, ed. Aubrey Manning and James Serpell, 1–22 (London, 1994). 20. These societies and their descendants have not, of course, vanished from the earth; far from it. Indeed, in many places non-Western religious, cultural, and aesthetic traditions are flourishing; however, their forms are today hybrid, modern/postmodern, localized/globalized, and so plural as to defy easy categorization; our intent is not to dismiss these important phenomena of the twenty-fi rst century, but we cannot fully discuss them, or their relationship to earlier cultural forms, in this context. 21. Nona C. Flores, introduction to Animals in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Flores (New York, 1996), ix. 22. Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 89. John Berger draws on Lévi-Strauss in his famous essay “Why Look at Animals?” For subsequent invocations of Lévi-Strauss, see Richard Tapper, “Animality, Humanity, Morality, Society,” in What Is an Animal? ed. Ingold, 47–62; Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation (Manchester, 1993), 6; and Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes, 2. Among the specifically historical works that focus primarily (though not always exclusively) on animals as symbols, as “good to think [with]” are: Robert Darnton, “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severine,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1985), 75–104; Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1987); Fudge, Perceiving Animals; Fudge, ed., Renaissance Beasts; Salisbury, The Beast Within; and Kathleen Kete, Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994). Th is list is by no means exhaustive. 23. Emile Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method, 8th ed., ed. George E. G. Catlin, trans. Saray A. Solvay and John H. Mueller (1895; repr., Chicago, 1962), 3. 24. Jane Goodale, To Sing with Pigs Is Human: The Concept of a Person in Papua New Guinea (Seatt le, 1995), 247–50. 25. Roy Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (1968; repr., New Haven, 1984), 58. 26. Ibid. 27. Some material historians have used animal artifacts to reconstruct pet-keep-

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susa n j. pea r son a nd m a ry w eism a ntel ing relations. In general, these scholars document but do not theorize the humananimal relationship (see, for example, Nancy Carlisle, “The Chewed Chair Leg and the Empty Collar: Mementos of Pet Ownership in New England,” Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife: Annual Proceedings 18 [1993]: 130–46; and Neil Dana Glukin, “Pet Birds and Cages of the Eighteenth Century,” Early American Life 8 [1977]: 38–41, 59). 28. Philo and Wilbert, Animals Spaces, 2. 29. Juliet Clutton-Brock, Horse Power: A History of the Horse and the Donkey in Human Societies (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 9. 30. Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962). 31. See, for example, Nicholas Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris: The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transit (Baton Rouge, 1996); and Anne Grimshaw, The Horse: A Bibliography of British Books, 1851–1976 (London, 1982), xi–xvi. See also the essay by Clay McShane and Joel Tarr in this volume. 32. Animals, for example, play a large role in the “Columbian Exchange,” the episode that environmental history has contributed to the rethinking of the larger narrative of North and South American history (see Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 [Westport, Ct., 1972]; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England [New York, 1983]); and Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico [Cambridge, U.K., 1994]). For a recent overview of animals in environmental history, see Harriet Ritvo, “Animal Planet,” Environmental History 9.2 (2004): 204–20, also available online at www .historycooperative.org/journals/eh/9.2/ritvo.html. 33. Tapper, “Animality, Humanity, Morality, Society,” 52–54. 34. Some scholars, for example, have discussed how animals have been used to articulate human class position (see Darnton, “Workers Revolt”; Ritvo, The Animal Estate; and Kete, Beast in the Boudoir). 35. Joanne P. Sharp et al., “Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance,” in Entanglements of Power, ed. Sharp et al. (London, 2000), 24–30; David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford, 1996). 36. See essays in the following collections: Jennifer Wolch and Jacque Emel, eds., “Bringing the Animals Back In,” special issue, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (1995): 631–760; Philo and Wolch, eds., “Animals and Geography,” special issue, Animals and Society 6 (1998); Philo and Wilbert, eds., Animal Spaces. 37. Virginia Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed America (New York, 2004), 177. 38. Linda Nash, “The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?” Environmental History 10.1 (2005), www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/10.1/nash.html.

36 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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Does “The Animal” Exist? 39. Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 113–24, esp. 115. 40. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (1940; repr., New York, 1969), 38. 41. Ibid., 36. 42. Ibid., 18–19. 43. Richard Bulliet calls this schism—on the one hand, highly industrialized animal labor and death, and on the other, highly sentimentalized attention to pets—characteristic of “postdomesticity” (see his Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships [New York, 2005]). 44. Katherine Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill, 2006). 45. David Wolfon and Mariann Sullivan, “Foxes in the Hen House: Animals, Agribusiness and the Law: A Modern American Fable,” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, ed. Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (Oxford, 2004), 205–33. 46. For the removal of animal industry from the city core over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Dorothee Brantz, “Slaughter in the City: The Establishment of Public Abattoirs in Paris and Berlin, 1780–1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2003); Chris Philo, “Animals, Geography, and the City: Notes on Inclusions and Exclusions,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (1995): 655–81; and Noelie Vialles, Animal to Edible (New York, 1994). 47. Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” 15–16. 48. For the notion of emotional labor, see Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2003); for a popular account of the emotional labor of modern pets, see Jon Katz, The New Work of Dogs: Tending to Life, Love, and Family (New York, 2003). 49. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York, 2006); Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (New York, 2001). 50. Sue Coe, for instance, both paints the insides of factory farms and slaughterhouses, and discusses how difficult it is to get access to such spaces (Coe, Dead Meat [New York and London, 1995]). 51. Daphne Merkin, “Let the Fur Fly,” New York Times Magazine, 1 May 2005, 21–24. For a full discussion of anti-pet sentiment, see James Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships (Cambridge, U.K. 1996). 52. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, 40.

37 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

Touching Animals The Search for a Deeper Understanding of Animals

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n ige l rot h fe l s

Since 2002, when it was fi rst displayed at the Arsenale in Venice, Gregory Colbert’s multimedia exhibition Ashes and Snow has drawn more than 1 million visitors to venues in New York City, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Tokyo, and Mexico. The exhibition includes more than fi ft y untitled, large-format, sepia-tone photographs of animals and people; a sixty-minute 35mm fi lm; two nine-minute fi lm “haikus”; and an epistolary novel that details a journey through time and space toward enlightenment. Ashes and Snow reaches a global audience, as well, through its Web site, online bookstore, affi liated foundation, and more. Every aspect of the project is carefully designed and controlled to reflect the deliberately meditative atmosphere of the photographs, through which Colbert is “exploring the shared language and poetic sensibilities of all animals . . . [and] working towards rediscovering the common ground that once existed when people lived in harmony with animals. The images depict a world that is without beginning or end, here or there, past or present.”1 For many who encounter this atemporal world, the fi rst reaction seems to be one of disbelief. Photographs of Colbert swimming with whales and manatees, in which he himself somehow appears to be an aquatic creature, and the many images of animals in apparent communion with humans seem more like ideas or fantasies than photographs of actual phenomena in the “real” world. The Ashes and Snow Web site addresses this feeling of disbelief in a brief description of Colbert’s creative process: “With profound patience 38

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Touching Animals

and an unswerving commitment to the expressive and artistic nature of animals, he has captured extraordinary interactions between humans and animals. . . . None of the images have been digitally collaged or superimposed. They record what the artist himself saw through the lens of his camera.”2 It must nevertheless be recognized that these are highly composed works that represent visions of a conceptual relationship with animals. Moreover, they are directed to an audience that acknowledges that the authentic experience of contact with the nonhuman has been lost to all save those few who work closely with animals in nature and are seen to have an almost spiritual connection with them. Colbert’s success stems largely from certain popular ideas about “nature” and “natural environments”—and about the animals that often stand in for those terms. The Ashes and Snow exhibition qualifies as much more than “just one of those New Age things.” At least part of what that more is can, I think, be found in the history of ideas about animals; and exploring that history will clarify more than just the aesthetic that informs Colbert’s art. Indeed, I believe that it will help us to see not only how ideas about animals and environments have changed since the nineteenth century but also why a persistent debate within the field now known as animal studies should be formulated in historical terms.

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The End of Seeing The expression to see the elephant appears to have been fairly common slang in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. It implied that one had experienced an extraordinary event, overcome a daunting obstacle, or witnessed something remarkable. A soldier returning from the Civil War had seen the elephant; the thousands who crossed the country on foot or by wagon, or who traveled by ship and overland through Panama, had seen the elephant; and farmers returning from a visit to one of the big cities had seen the elephant. The etymology of this idiom remains a bit vague, however; the fi rst two instances noted in the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, are from 1835 and 1844, but they both suggest that the expression was already in wide use.3 The OED also notes a related seventeenth-century expression, to see the lions, which derived “from the practice of taking visitors to see the lions which used to be kept in the Tower of London.”4 The OED’s defi nition of see[ing] the lions connects the origin of the expression with the act of actually seeing animals, and my guess is that see[ing] the elephant probably came about in 39 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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the same way. When elephants fi rst came to the United States at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, the animals would travel, typically on foot, from town to town, and people from the surrounding areas would pay a fee to see the elephant. The correspondence and diary of Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker in 1796, for example, refer repeatedly to going to see the elephant that was exhibited by Captain Jacob Crowninshield beginning in April of that year. In a letter of 1 August, she writes: “William went . . . to see the Elephant which he thinks a very curious Animal and well worth while to go to tenth street in Market Street to see—it is a young female about 3 years old and is at present the largest beast he ever saw. ’Tis said they are 30 years coming to their full groath, they must be large indeed when arrived to it.”5 Drinker herself went to see the elephant on 12 November 1796 and noted in her diary:

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We walked under the covered market to avoid the wet pavements. . . . [T]here, said he, is kept the Elephant, which is returned to the City for a Shew—I immediately concluded to see it, and we went back into a small and ordinary room, where was tag. rag &c. No body that I knew but Abil. Griffits with two of her grand Children, she was in the same predicament with myself, and we were pleased to see each other—The innocent, good natured ugly Beast was there, which I need not undertake to describe, only to say, that it is indeed a curiosity to most that sees it, one of the kind never having been in this part of the World before, I could not help pitying the poor Creature, whom they keep in constant agitation, and often give it rum or brandy to drink—I think they will fi nish it ’ere long.6

On 14 November, she wrote: “I sent our Bett y Burrage and Sall Dawson to see the Elephant this Afternoon”; and a few weeks later, on 13 December, she recorded that “after dinner R Jones, MS. and HD. went to see the Elephant.”7 Crowninshield’s elephant presented a remarkable spectacle, and seeing it, or one of the elephants that came to the United States later, quickly became a kind of historical and cultural marker. Like living through the worst blizzard in decades, seeing the elephant was something one shared with one’s neighbors and bragged about to others; and it probably did not take long for the simile to move across the country. With that said, it is important to note the matter-of-factness of Drinker’s account. For her, Crowninshield’s elephant was far removed from the monstrous, awe-inspiring creatures in accounts from late antiquity to the beginning of the 1700s.8 Whereas earlier descriptions usually depicted the elephant either as the spectacular war machine of Alexander the Great and the apocryphal Books of the Maccabees or as a fitt ing symbol of princely power, by the late eighteenth century the elephant had become merely a striking curiosity, more pathetic than horrifying. 40

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Touching Animals

But with the arrival of all kinds of spectacles in cities and even small towns in the second half of the nineteenth century; with the growing availability of illustrated natural histories of animals from all over the world; and with the importation and exhibition of hundreds of elephants into the United States, the significance of “seeing the elephant” must have gradually begun to decrease. By the time Barnum and Bailey circus elephants were being paraded through towns in the 1890s, the animals, though clearly sensational, were already familiar to most adult Americans. Instead of asking, “Did you see the elephant?” people probably started to ask “Did you see an elephant?” in a usage comparable to the one we use today when asking our children about a field trip to the zoo. If the significance of simply seeing an elephant began to diminish in the second half of the nineteenth century, other kinds of encounters with elephants continued to be defi ning cultural markers in the West. Tracking and killing an elephant became, for many, one of the most important experiences a man could have. In his memoir of hunting in southern Africa, Roualeyn Gordon Cumming declared that all of his efforts on the “Dark Continent” would have amounted to litt le had he not killed what he considered the ultimate quarry. Recalling his thoughts after having shot a “magnificent specimen of the giraffe, measuring upward of eighteen feet in height,” he wrote: “I stood for nearly half an hour engrossed in the contemplation of his extreme beauty and gigantic proportions; and, if there had been no elephants, I could have exclaimed, like Duke Alexander of Gordon when he killed the famous old stag with seventeen tine, ‘Now I can die happy.’ But I longed for an encounter with the noble elephants; and I thought litt le more of the giraffe than if I had killed a gemsbok or an eland.”9 For Cumming—as for most European and American hunters in the nineteenth century—the elephant was something altogether different from any other animal: “The appearance of the wild elephant is inconceivably majestic and imposing. His gigantic height and colossal bulk, so greatly surpassing all other quadrupeds, combined with his sagacious disposition and peculiar habits, impart to him an interest in the eyes of the hunter which no other animal can call forth.”10 He concludes the description of his fi rst successful elephant hunt by saying, “I never felt so gratified on any former occasion as I did then.”11 Cumming’s sentiments have been shared by generations of hunters. As Theodore Roosevelt put it: “[T]he elephant has always profoundly impressed the imagination of mankind. It is, not only to hunters, but to naturalists, and to all people who possess any curiosity about wild creatures and the wild life of nature, the most interesting of all animals.”12 Even when it was argued 41

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that other animals presented a more perilous hunt, Roosevelt insisted that “[t]he chase of the elephant, if persistently followed, entails more fatigue and hardship than any other kind of African hunting.” Though the lion may be more dangerous, “far greater demands are made by elephant hunting on the qualities of personal endurance and hardihood and resolute perseverance in the face of disappointment and difficulty.”13 For Roosevelt and many other famous and not-so-famous hunters, shooting an elephant seems to have constituted prima facie evidence of manliness; and the accounts of his own elephant hunts and those of his son were focal points in his celebratory narrative of his African safaris, African Game Trails. Cumming’s memoir appeared in 1850 and Roosevelt’s was published in 1910, but the ideas these two works contain about the meaning of killing an elephant have had remarkable staying power. They are as evident in such widely contrasting twentieth-century accounts as George Orwell’s anticolonial essay “Shooting an Elephant” and Peter Kubelka’s 1966 experimental fi lm Unsere Afr ikareise; they also help to explain why a group of grinning men would agree to have their picture taken after it took them more than a hundred shots to bring down a chained-up elephant named Black Diamond (also known as Diamond) that had killed a woman in Corsicana, Texas, in October 1929. In many ways, the killing of Black Diamond recalls the execution of another famous elephant, Chunee, at the Exeter Exchange just over a century earlier, in 1826. In both cases, an unruly elephant was deemed a threat to public safety, and a decision was made to put the animal down. In Chunee’s case, successive periods of what was apparently musth (a temporary condition of heightened aggression among male elephants) raised concerns that he would break out of his cage, which stood on a specially reinforced area of the Exchange’s second story. “The great fear expressed by all present,” as A. D. Bartlett recorded, “was that he would break out, as had he done so, the whole floor of the building would have given way under his weight and he would have landed in the Bazaar in the Strand beneath.”14 In Black Diamond’s case, the elephant had killed a Mrs. Eva Speed Donohoo, who, told by the elephant’s former trainer that she could pet it, had approached Black Diamond on his way from the train to the circus grounds. Unsuccessful efforts to poison both elephants led to their being shot more than a hundred times with muskets (Chunee) and assorted rifles and pistols (Black Diamond). Both animals were later sentimentalized in popular accounts that portrayed them as unfortunate victims of circumstance, and their corpses were mounted for display in natural-historical collections. What seem to distinguish the killings, however, are the sharply contrasting feelings among those present. 42

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Touching Animals

Reports of Chunee’s death suggest that it was a grim, terrifying, and regrettable experience for all.15 In the case of Black Diamond, while it is clear that many who saw the “execution”—the term used by the elephant trainer and witness George Washington “Slim” Lewis—were upset by both the decision to kill the elephant and the incompetent marksmanship that prolonged the ordeal, it is also apparent that there were others who found the occasion exciting and in some way deeply gratifying. As Lewis recalled in a 1980 lecture at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo while describing a photograph of those who participated in the event:

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These men are what they call Texas crack shots. Now I don’t think that any of them could hit the side of a barn. They had to shoot this animal over a hundred times before he went down. . . . Now, this had to be done, and I think any man that had to be his executioner should have, after he did the job, should have left as soon as possible. Here is the fi rst man [of] the ones that shot this elephant. He had courage enough to walk over to this elephant [that] was dead and couldn’t move before it was dead, to make sure he was dead. And after he did, then the rest of them had courage enough to walk over there and have a big smile on their face. Th is was the most exciting thing that ever happened to these men, I imagine, in their lifetime. Now [had] they been out in the jungles [with] an elephant that was free and had half a chance to protect itself, then maybe they would of had a reason to say, “Well, I shot an elephant.” But I don’t see why these men would ever want to tell anyone, “Oh I shot that Dia . . . Black Diamond elephant.” I wouldn’t never been able to be proud of that, the way that animal was chained up.16

For the men who killed Black Diamond, there were experiences much bigger and more important than just “seeing the elephant”; for these men—and even for Lewis, who criticizes them—killing an elephant had become a uniquely significant experience. One could argue he had accomplished something when he killed an elephant. There were, of course, things less profound than killing them that one could do with elephants. First of all, one could feed them, and photographs of hands outstretched to trunks reside in the archives of every Western zoo. Second, one could ride them. Between 1865 and 1882, millions of visitors to the London Zoo rode on the back of Jumbo, and his example was followed by whole strings of elephants in European and American zoos. Th ird, one could teach them to do tricks, and by the end of the nineteenth century, traveling elephants had become true performers. Unlike Crowninshield’s elephant— which had done litt le more than stand around, eat, and drink alcohol in various forms—his successors raised their trunks on command, trumpeted and bellowed, carried passengers, rang bells, uncorked bott les, knelt or lay down, 43

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and so on. In recent decades, however, and paralleling the decline of opportunities to hunt elephants with anything but a camera, all of these activities have gradually ceased. By and large, the zoo-going public has accepted that feeding animals outside of prescribed guidelines is irresponsible; elephant rides have all but disappeared due to liability concerns and to the belief that captive animals should not be seen primarily as objects of entertainment; and the heyday of elephant performances in circuses and zoos ended at least twenty years ago. Elephants, at least in Europe and North America, have become increasingly removed from interaction with the public and even from close contact with their keepers. Elephant management outside of circuses and free-range sett ings is steadily moving toward the practice known as “protected contact,” where keepers stand outside the bars and beyond the elephants’ reach, and the animals are trained through positive reinforcement. These changes have typically occurred over the course of individual elephants’ lives. When the African elephant Lucy arrived at the Milwaukee County Zoo in 1962, for example, she was actively handled by her keepers; by the time she died fortyfour years later, her contact with keepers was almost exclusively through the bars of her stall. In the context of changing management practices, debate about whether elephants even belong in zoos has intensified; and several high-profi le sanctuaries where elephants can be retired from circuses and zoos have been established in the United States. While staff and selected donors at these sanctuaries continue to have access to the animals, these habitats are intended as a fi nal refuge for the animals from the stresses of living with people. Within just the past few years, elephant programs at zoos across the United States have been terminated, and many other prominent zoos have announced that they will be phasing out their elephant programs. Increasingly, animal-rights groups are arguing that elephants simply do not belong in zoos and circuses, and they hope to see these animals transferred to sanctuaries, such as the Hohenwald Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee and the Ark 2000 Sanctuary in San Andreas, California. In these sett ings, animal advocates contend, elephants will at last be able to live free of human contact. According to the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), which built Ark 2000, the goal of the sanctuary is to “restore and maintain the health and dignity of these formerly abused animals”; therefore, “the sanctuary will not be open to the public. However, a visitor’s center at the entry to the site will enable PAWS to acquaint people with the sanctuary through television monitors inside the facilities.”17

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Touching Animals

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Touching As such activities as hunting, feeding, riding, and watching elephant performances have become more and more uncommon, one particular desire of the public has become increasingly apparent. Whenever I am around a group of people behind the scenes in an elephant barn at a zoo, circus, or elsewhere, the thing they want most is not simply to see an elephant but to touch one. What does this desire for contact with elephants and animals in general signify? During a visit to Carl Hagenbeck’s Animal Park outside Hamburg in the summer of 1913, Kaiser Wilhelm II was led to a small grassy lawn surrounded by a low chain barrier. Standing with a semicircle of men behind him that included his entourage and Lorenz and Heinrich Hagenbeck, sons of the zoo’s creator, the kaiser reached out to stroke the nascent horn and muzzle of a young black rhinoceros newly arrived from Africa. The moment was photographed. On the back of the young rhino’s neck rests the hand of its captor, Christoph Schulz, who stands with it and another rhino inside the barrier. Just visible behind Schulz is one of the men who helped him with the transport from Africa—a Maasai man who was also clearly on display that day at Hagenbeck’s. The focus of almost all the eyes is on the kaiser’s right hand as it touches the rhino. Heinrich Hagenbeck’s left foot casually holds down the chain barrier, and as Schulz apparently points out aspects of the animal, the kaiser’s hand seems to scratch the hard, muscled flesh of the rhino’s upper lip. The photograph is part of an album in the possession of Schulz’s descendants that commemorates the kaiser’s visit to the park. The image is notable because, although the kaiser visited Hagenbeck’s several times and there are many photographs of him touring the grounds, pictures of him actually touching an animal are quite rare. It was simply not considered appropriate to photograph the kaiser pett ing animals, and nearly every other such picture is stamped with explicit directions that it not be published or reproduced. Essentially, a candid shot recording an impromptu moment during the course of a formal visit, the photograph seems to have evaded notice because it was intended for a limited audience. One hundred years after it was taken, it sits in a box of photo albums in a house in Texas. Like so many pictures from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this one seems both familiar and remote. On the one hand, the kaiser’s gesture is recognizable to us. We see in it the ease of someone raised on a farm or ranch patt ing the muzzle of a favorite horse. But it is precisely the relaxed quality of the kaiser’s movement that pushes the image into the past. Today, except perhaps for those who work with such animals professionally, few people would touch a rhinoceros 45 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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Christoph Schulz shows Kaiser Wilhelm II a young rhino. (Courtesy of the Schulz Collection,

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Lampasas, Texas)

casually. When my son was four years old, he and I had the opportunity to feed sweet potatoes to a full-grown black rhino off exhibit at a zoo. We also stroked the animal’s (much larger) horn and felt the surprisingly powerful upper lip, but our actions were unlike the kaiser’s. His calm acceptance of something stunningly unusual was replaced by our hesitancy toward a creature that is ironically both much more and much less familiar: “more” because most of us have seen a rhinoceros; “less” because few of us touch large animals anymore, and we would probably be diffident about touching even a dairy cow. The photograph of the kaiser and the rhinoceros brings to mind two quite different but well-known observations: one by Walter Benjamin and the other by John Berger. Benjamin’s appears in his essay “Gloves,” which was fi rst published in the 1926 collection Einbahnstrasse: In an aversion to animals the predominant feeling is fear of being recognized by them through contact. The horror that stirs deep in man is an obscure awareness that in him something lives so akin to the animal that it might be recognized. All disgust is originally disgust at touching. Even when the feeling is mastered, it is only by a drastic gesture that overleaps its mark: the nauseous is violently en46

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Touching Animals

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gulfed, eaten, while the zone of fi nest epidermal contact remains taboo. Only in this way is the paradox of the moral demand to be met, exacting simultaneously the overcoming and the subtlest elaboration of man’s sense of disgust. He may not deny his bestial relationship with animals, the invocation of which revolts him: he must make himself its master.18

Th is difficult passage deals with what Marcus Bullock, commenting on “Gloves,” describes as fear of “a lack of decisive distinction between the animal and ourselves,” a distrust of the tactile as a legitimate way of acquiring knowledge (an issue on which Benjamin’s thinking would change in later works), and a horror at the att raction of the impure.19 The passage stems from a particular social and religious milieu, but it points to the growing separation between animals and humans in nineteenth-century Western Europe and America. When Benjamin writes of man’s “horror” that he may somehow be recognized as animal, and claims that this feeling is heightened through physical contact, he is arguing from a world in which a crucial distance exists between animals and humans. Th is distance is part of John Berger’s larger contention about animals and capitalism in his seminal essay “Why Look at Animals?” about the marginalization of animals in the nineteenth century. Recalling an earlier time in which animals were central to human experience, Berger argues that industrial capitalism and its concentration of labor into cities removed animals from humans’ daily experience. Among the consequences, he claims, was that once-profound connections between animals and humans were reduced to artificial representations: real animals were transformed into a proliferation of animal images, stuffed toys, and hollow, alienated shadows trying desperately and impossibly to hide from the gaze of a human audience in the increasingly popular zoological gardens. For Berger, the zoo is simply a reification of the total disconnection between animals and humans in the modern world. As he says in the essay’s most frequently quoted passage: “Public zoos came into existence at the beginning of the period which was to see the disappearance of animals from daily life. The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters. Modern zoos are an epitaph to a relationship which was as old as man.”20 Berger’s insight is manifested in the difference between the kaiser’s ease in touching a rhinoceros at the beginning of the twentieth century and the awkwardness of a father and son doing the same thing at the beginning of the following century. In Berger’s view, the kaiser should be understood as a holdover from an earlier time, someone comfortable with animals and for whom 47

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nigel rothfels

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barriers to animals should always be casually pressed down with a foot. Still, the barriers had arisen, and although Carl Hagenbeck was the great innovator of moated, barless enclosures for zoos, the lack of bars in Hagenbeck’s cages should be interpreted as masking their critical importance.21 The animals at Hagenbeck’s were not free—they were just supposed to look that way. Indeed, the kaiser’s gesture, pace Berger, should probably be seen as a move across what would soon become a chasm of inaccessibility. Importantly for Berger, what capitalism has sundered can never be rejoined—there is no “way back” to innocence. By the time the public zoological garden had come into existence, it was too late to reestablish our former relationship with animals. As he puts it, the “historic loss” of the human connection to animals, the loss “to which zoos are a monument,” has become “irredeemable for the culture of capitalism.”22 Whether or not the “human connection to animals” is “irredeemable,” I think it is undeniably true that a great deal of thinking about animals since the nineteenth century has been directed precisely at that very redemption. Indeed, I would argue that the

Panorama in Hagenbeck’s Animal Park. (Courtesy of Hagenbecks Tierpark, Hamburg, Germany)

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Touching Animals

quest for a connection to or communion with animals (or the restoration of that connection or communion, as some would see it) may be a distinguishing feature of the postmodern human relationship to animals. For whatever reason, people seem to feel they have lost a link to animals (and the more general “nature” for which animals are a synecdoche), and that loss is at least part of what rests behind such divergent quests as Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and Jane Goodall’s research at Gombe; the commerce of whale-watching trips, dolphin “encounters,” and pet mediums; the art produced by Joseph Beuys, Ollie and Suzie, or, with elephants, by Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid; a national-parks movement that seeks to preserve nature as it existed before the arrival of capitalism; the development of wildlife documentaries, nature TV, and such compelling media personalities as Steve Irwin, Jacques Cousteau, Marlin Perkins, George Page, or Marty Stouffer; the expansion of pet keeping, including the expanding market for exotic pets; the sanctuary movement; the rising popularity of vegetarian, vegan, and raw foodways; and even, perhaps, the emergence of a new academic discipline.

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Discipline In the spring of 2003, a conference was convened by the Smithsonian’s Conservation and Research Center to discuss “elephants and ethics.” A group of invited speakers from around the world included scientists, wildlife managers, animal-rights activists, academics, and people involved in the management of captive elephants in zoological gardens and circuses. I participated as a historian interested in the history of ideas about elephants. Two of the scientific presenters—Richard Fayrer-Hosken, a theriogenologist at the University of Georgia, and Ian Whyte, a field scientist at Kruger National Park in South Africa—had been researching the possible use of immunocontraception to control elephant reproduction at Kruger.23 As part of their presentation, Fayrer-Hosken reviewed the usual methods of wildlife population control: selective culling and/or hunting of individuals or groups; translocation of individuals or groups; or some form of contraception or sterilization. Each method presents significant technical, logistical, political, fi nancial, and ethical advantages and disadvantages to wildlife managers attempting to control elephant populations. Of the three approaches, however, contraception using porcine zona pellucida antigen vaccinations may, according to these two researchers, be the best way to control expanding populations of elephants in those places where management plans emphasize genetic diversity instead of simply more elephants. 49 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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In a later discussion, during which I referred to a research project designed to manage populations of white-tailed deer in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park through the sterilization of female deer, I asked Fayrer-Hosken whether surgical sterilization of wild female elephants had ever been considered as a possible option. With a look that mixed humor and perhaps horror, he observed simply that “elephants are really big animals.” Assuming, then, a more pedagogical tone, he clarified the substantial differences between elephants and deer by discussing the obstacles, in the case of elephants, of field anesthetization, a surgery that would involve practically stepping inside the animal, and species-specific concerns about postoperative recovery. Indeed, the goal of the immunocontraceptive approach is to be as minimally invasive as possible and to avoid disrupting the life of the elephant. Th is interchange between us underscored one of the conference’s major challenges—and, arguably, one of its major successes: while the whole idea behind the event was to bring together people with widely differing fields of expertise to discuss their shared interests in elephants, in practice, communicating across disciplines, backgrounds, and politics was never easy. In a way, as ill-prepared as I may have been to understand even some quite mundane aspects of real elephants, it was also difficult for others to understand why I emphasized that scientific and practical knowledge about elephants should be seen at least partly within specific historical sett ings. For me, the conference had to be situated within a distinct historical trajectory of ideas that should be understood before anything else; for others, the conference was about coming up with practical guidelines for managing elephants in captivity in the future; for still others, it was about ending captivity altogether. In a very different sett ing, namely at a conference on animals and representation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2000, Alphonso Lingis mixed—or perhaps mixed up—disciplinary discourses of natural history with art criticism while describing courtship behaviors among medieval knights, sage grouse, satin bower birds, and the performance artists Jackson Pollock and Orlan. The resulting shifts led him to observe that “[t]he epigamic characteristics for which they are selected signal the superior genetic endowment of the knights. They also function as stimuli for sexual arousal of the females. At the present time, we do not know how much a mode of display behavior has been incorporated within the central nervous system, ready to be called into play by the action of sex hormones which are liberated during the maturation of the gonads.”24 After describing the knights at length with natural-historical language emphasizing the selective evolutionary advantages of certain

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Touching Animals

ritual displays and costuming, Lingis then employed the terms of art criticism to depict the elaborate creations of the bower birds:

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Georges Bataille emphasized the excesses built up and released in this kind of art. Erotic beauty is excessive, excess in flamboyant colours, in monstrous forms. . . . Peculiar adornments are thrust in to prominence: crests, watt les, ruffs, collars, tippets, trains, spurs, excrescences on wings and bills, tinted mouths, tails of weird or exquisite form, bladders, highly coloured patches of bare skin, elongated plumes, brightly hued feet and legs. Att itudes and movements tend to be odd, exaggerated, or unwonted. The display is nearly always beautiful; it is always striking.25

Lingis’s basic point is defensible enough: the weaknesses of the core vernaculars of different disciplines become glaringly obvious when they are applied to objects or processes beyond their borders. In practical terms, the separations between disciplinary practices and their differing epistemological claims can be seen in the most banal settings. When we view elephant displays at a natural-history museum, for example, we typically learn that the creatures may be closely related to both the extinct mammoth and the living hyrax. Similarly, when we visit elephants at the zoological garden, we typically learn that elephants live in Africa and Asia, along with a few basic facts about their lives in the wild. The most apparent fact, however—that the elephants or remains of elephants we are looking at are located in, for example, Wisconsin; that the elephant before us resides not in India but in the midwestern United States—is simply left outside the usual conceptual framework. Th is point was brought home to a thoughtful audience of zoo professionals during a regional meeting of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association in 2004 when the anthropologist Garry Marvin discussed, among other things, the contradictions inherent in the signs displayed at zoo exhibits: the range of this jaguar is not, in fact, somewhere in South or Central America but several hundred square feet in the United States. Of course, neither zoological gardens nor natural history museums are in the habit of exploring all of the problems of representation embedded in their exhibits. To be completely clear, I am not arguing that popular knowledge and scientific data about elephants should be seen as somehow equivalent. I am not one of those people for whom, as Matt Cartmill puts it, “the facts reported by science are just the surface layer that has to be scraped off to expose the underlying moral and political reality.”26 On the contrary, I accept the idea that scientific studies have yielded reliable data about elephants, the validity 51

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of which is not dependent on the human historical context that generated that data. Nevertheless, much of what we think we know about elephants must still be acknowledged as resting on unscientific foundations. For example, over the past two hundred years a great deal has been written about elephants’ long memories and complex emotional lives. But the persistent interest in these topics cannot be att ributed to ongoing scientific revelations about the physiological bases of memory and emotions in elephants. We need to ask why we think these particular capacities are important issues in our understanding of elephants. In the end, most of us will concede that there are probably many elephants who forget things all the time, just as there are many other animals whose memories seem to be far better than those of elephants. And as for emotions, just how can we actually make sense of the emotional states of creatures so very different from us? I believe we study and write about elephant memory and elephant emotion because these issues are interesting to us, and somehow they become even more interesting when we encounter them in what Fayrer-Hosken wryly described as “really big animals.” When an animal (and here I could as easily be talking about whales as elephants) has so much of everything, when it is gray and wrinkled, and when it is known to exhibit particularly dramatic behaviors, it is perhaps understandable, even if hardly inevitable, that humans would be interested in its memory and emotional states. My point is that in thinking carefully about history and animals, it should be clear that to an important extent we make our elephants. In some significant way, if obviously not in all ways, they are part of human culture. I am not saying that the only elephants are the ones we dream up. But when we see an elephant at the zoo, performing in a circus, in a nature documentary; when we read essays on the ethical management of elephants; when the New York Times Magazine prints a feature-length article on an alleged sociocultural breakdown in wild elephants and post-traumatic stress disorder among captive elephants, it is vital for us to recognize that the “real thing” we are seeing may well be at least partly a human cultural creation.27 Just because past scientific claims about elephants have been challenged by more recent studies does not prove our inability objectively, or even empathically, to know about the creatures—the testing of theories is, after all, how science functions. Still, recognizing how and what we have thought about elephants in the past should make us cautious about what we claim to know now and how we claim to know it. Over the course of these last comments, I have repeatedly conflated popular and scientific understandings of animals—the often-visited we in the 52

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Touching Animals

preceding paragraph, for example, is mostly a popular one. Th is habit stems from the remarkable persistence, and sometimes immense political importance, of popular beliefs about animals. In her introduction to the section titled “Categories” in Arien Mack’s collection Humans and Other Animals, Harriet Ritvo makes this point succinctly, writing that it has been, “after all, thousands of years since Aristotle opined that dolphins were not fish, but many people remain unpersuaded.”28 Today, when someone (especially in the West), claims that elephants never forget, when they think it is at least possible that elephants might be afraid of mice, when they spend thousands of dollars to purchase paintings made by elephants working in Thailand or in their local zoo, when they argue that an elephant who has lived in a zoo for most of her life deserves retirement in a sunny sanctuary, they are thinking about both the lives of elephants and their own lives. They are emphatically not thinking about the results of scientific research on elephants. Ritvo follows up her point by arguing that “non-scientific taxonomies can be as illuminating as scientific ones with regard to both classifiers and classified.”29 On the one hand, this is empirically true; one would also have to allow, however, that while nonscientific taxonomies can reveal an immense amount about those who create them, they rarely disclose that much about the classified creatures themselves. Th is seems to me to be a crucial point about both the often-hoped-for interdisciplinarity of animal studies as well as the often-repeated criticism that most of those in the humanities who write about animals are generally interested only in how animals have been perceived, imagined, or represented by humans—that is, that these scholars are, to paraphrase Ritvo, fundamentally more interested in the classifiers than the classified. Th is contention fi rst gained momentum in the essay “Making Animals Matter,” written by Charles Bergman in 2001 for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Referring to the conference in Milwaukee mentioned above, Bergman said that he was “disturbed by the fact that most of the speakers were willing, almost glibly, to dismiss the animal as animal.” While some of those “attending the conference cared about creatures,” most, he noted, “talked almost exclusively about what representations of animals mean to us. They said virtually nothing about how our representations affect the animals, or the ethical issues involved in representation. The actual animals seemed almost an embarrassment, a disturbance to the symbolic field.”30 The problem, Bergman claimed, is that academic discourse “treats animals as if they had no lives of their own. Denied mind, subjectivity, and agency, they are living robots. Their lives are wholly contingent.”31 Bergman’s points were echoed by Julie Smith when she reviewed the same 53

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conference, along with several others, and wrote that those who were “expecting scholarly discussion similar to that in Women’s Studies or Race-andEthnicity Studies . . . were not prepared for the diverse understandings of animals, many of which recapitulated the production of animals as objects and differed litt le in spirit from the exploitative representations under analysis.” “In sum,” she reported, “animal advocates felt that conference papers demonstrated impressive levels of expertise about the ways that animals are processed by culture but that often the animal was tragically absent.”32 In other words, scholars attempting to trace the historical and contemporary ways in which animals are imagined in various cultures have not simply objectified the animal (the error, it is argued, of much scientific discourse); they have completely effaced the real animal and replaced it with its intellectualized and essentially phantom representation. Emerging from the dispute over representation is a disciplinary stalemate, one that shows litt le sign of being resolved. According to Erica Fudge, the contest is between the empiricists and poststructuralists; between those who believe “that the past is recoverable to history through an objective analysis of its documents” and those who believe “that history is constructed (not always-already there for the taking), and that the documents of the past are always-already only representations.”33 Steve Baker summarizes the debate more broadly as one between “animal advocates, activists, and academics who are directly concerned with the actual mistreatment of ‘real’ living animals” and those they perceive as “self-indulgent scholars who seem more concerned with exploring fancy theories of representation than with addressing the real plight of the represented animals.”34 Smith sees “pro-animal” and “pro-use” views of “scholarly advocacy” and “scholarly detachment” confl icting with the “question of whether culture can ever authoritatively represent animals.”35 Part of the problem, of course, is that even when discussions have been “amiable” and “good-natured,” even when there might be consensus on the desirability of “a tolerance for diverse opinion,” the positions have been “regarded by some as irreconcilable.”36 To be sure, efforts have been made to stake out a middle ground. Fudge, for example, has made it clear that while a history of animals, as animals, is “impossible”—“If our only access to animals in the past is through documents written by humans, then we are never looking at the animals, only ever at the representation of the animals by humans”—it may nevertheless be the case that writing about the history of ideas about animals can destabilize the category of human.37 Such a reinterpretation of the “splendid isolation” of the human, she suggests, could have 54

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Touching Animals

a profound effect on the lives of living, real animals.38 Meanwhile, Marvin adopts a generally ameliorative tone when he writes:

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Although a living animal is never merely nor solely a representation, it is, in the moment of our encounter with it, always a social and cultural animal and there is no a-social or a-cultural platform we can stand on to see an animal as it really is. It is important to attend to these social and cultural perspectives if we are to understand how and why people look at animals and the practices that result from such viewing and if we are to understand what happens in the encounter between humans and animals when animals are present and not merely represented.39

But even this notion of “middle ground” implies that there will likely be litt le agreement about the purpose of animal studies. Fudge’s clarity about the fi xed limits of discussion about historical animals outside of their representation, along with Marvin’s caution to focus on living animals only while remaining committed to the possibility of describing the real, point to what may be the major fault line in this interdisciplinary exchange. Ever since Ritvo’s groundbreaking historical treatment of the place of animals in Victorian England, The Animal Estate, and Berger’s study of the marginalization of animals in modernity, the “representational debate” has been as much about the differences between scholars investigating lived versus historic relations with animals as anything else. Bergman makes this clear in the opening and closing sections of “Making Animals Matter.” Before engaging with the question of representation in academic discourse about animals, Bergman relates an experience he had pursuing jaguars in the Mexican jungle shortly before attending the Milwaukee conference. Bergman tells of how he joined a team of biologists and hounds in “nearly two weeks of hard work and unflagging persistence” as they tried to “locate, track, and fi nally tree” a jaguar in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. Describing the eventual examination of the jaguar, Bergman also notes “one gesture” that he and all his human colleagues made toward the animal: “Each of us stopped what we were doing at some point to reach out and touch the sleeping jaguar. It was a simple and reverent gesture of contact, feeling the animal’s strongly muscled body, stroking his magnificent, spotted fur. The jaguar was a powerful, living presence.” Bergman admits that “touching the jaguar was the experience of a lifetime,” an experience that “dramatize[d] . . . the absence of the animal as an animal in our universities” and “drove home to me the difference between my experience of touching the jaguar in the jungle and the way that academics conceive of animals.”40 Bergman argues that litt le genuine knowledge about animals can be gleaned from the academic discourse of representation. More can be gained, 55

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he contends, from a quiet touch of a living animal than from obfuscating language directed at scholarly analyses of what this jaguar means to us. Referring to Jane Goodall’s celebrity status at the conference, Bergman observes that “she addresses a huge hunger in the general population for knowledge and a deeper understanding of animals,” and he connects that yearning with “the desire all of us in the Mexican jungle had to touch the jaguar. . . . The grueling challenges of chasing the jaguar in the Mexican jungle and the thrill of touching it produced an increased respect for the animal’s intelligence and value. We need to care as much for the worlds of being as we do the worlds of meaning.”41 Around his critique of the problem of representation, Bergman builds a case for the redemptive touch of the animal. Using language strangely (and presumably purposely) reminiscent of nineteenth-century hunting literature, he provides a critical backdrop to the touches displayed by Colbert in the Ashes and Snow exhibition. For both Colbert and Bergman, the moment of the touch seems to obliterate history, memory, culture, and personality; all that apparently remains is knowledge and a “deeper understanding.” Th is, they affi rm, must be seen as the powerful and lived experience of communion and fellowship with animals. For my part, when I read that someone believes he can learn something resembling truth from touching an unconscious animal, I can’t help but think about the historical context of that touch and what that touch of a real animal means to the writer, let alone what it might mean to the animal. Perhaps because I am a historian, I can’t possibly conceive of this touch outside a discussion of representation.

Notes I am grateful for the many editorial improvements suggested by Dorothee Brantz and especially Mary Tonkinson. 1. Colbert’s description of the project appears on the “Vision” page of the exhibition Web site: www.ashesandsnow.org/en/vision/. 2. Ibid. 3. See The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 20 vols. (Oxford, 1989), 5:134, s.v. elephant: “That’s sufficient, as Tom Haynes said when he saw the elephant” (Augustus B. Longstreet, 1835); and “There is a cant expression, ‘I’ve seen the elephant’ in very common use in Texas” (George Wilkins Kendall in Narrative of the Texan Santa Fé Expedition, 1844). 4. Ibid., 8:1001, s.v. lion. 5. Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker, The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, ed. Elaine Forman Crane (Boston, 1991), 831. 6. Ibid., 860. 56

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Touching Animals 7. Ibid., 860, 866. 8. See Nigel Rothfels, “Elephants, Ethics, and History,” in Elephants and Ethics: Toward a Morality of Coexistence, ed. Christen Wemmer and Catherine A. Christen (Baltimore, 2008), 101–19. 9. Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, Five Years of a Hunter’s Life in the Far Interior of South Afr ica: With Notices on the Native Tribes, and Anecdotes of the Chase, of the Lion, Elephant, Hippopotamus, Giraffe, Rhinoceros, etc., 2 vols. (New York, 1850), 1:259. 10. Ibid., 1:265–66. 11. Ibid., 1:301. See also Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1987); and Nigel Rothfels, “Killing Elephants: Pathos and Prestige in the Nineteenth Century,” in Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin Danahay (Burlington, Vt., 2007), 53–64. 12. Theodore Roosevelt, Afr ican Game Trails: An Account of the Afr ican Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist (New York, 1910), 283. 13. Ibid., 190, 192. 14. A. D. Bartlett , Wild Animals in Captivity, comp. and ed. Edward Bartlett (London, 1899), 44. See also Narisara Murray, “Lives of the Zoo: Charismatic Animals in the Social Worlds of the Zoological Gardens of London, 1850–1897” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2004). 15. Ritvo, The Animal Estate, 225–28. 16. George Washington “Slim” Lewis, “Elephant Talk,” lecture at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, delivered 3 June 1980 and videotaped by Mark Rosenthal. 17. Performing Animal Welfare Society, “Ark 2000 Wildlife Refuge,” htt p:// pawsweb.org/site/about/ark2000.htm. 18. Walter Benjamin, “Gloves,” in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London, 1997), 50–51. 19. Marcus Bullock to the author, 20 January 2005. 20. John Berger, About Looking (London, 1980), 19. See also Jonathan Burt, “A Close Reading of John Berger’s ‘Why Look at Animals?’” Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 9.2 (2005): 203–18; and Garry Marvin, “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Seeing, Looking, Watching, Observing Animals,” Society & Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies 13.1 (2005): 1–11. 21. Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore, 2002). 22. Berger, About Looking, 26. 23. The paper was later published as Ian Whyte and Richard Fayrer-Hosken, “Playing Elephant God: Ethics of Managing Wild African Elephant Populations,” in Elephants and Ethics, ed. Wemmer and Christen, 319–417. 24. Alphonso Lingis, “Quadrille,” Performance Research 5.2 (2000): 1–10, esp. 2–3. 57 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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25. Ibid., 8–9. 26. Matt Cartmill, “Oppressed by Evolution,” Discovery 19.3 (1998): 78–83, esp. 82. 27. Charles Siebert, “An Elephant Crackup?” New York Times Magazine, 8 October 2006, 42ff. 28. Harriet Ritvo, introduction to “Categories” section of Humans and Other Animals, ed. Arien Mack (New York, 1995), 4. 29. Ibid. 30. Charles Bergman, “Making Animals Matter,” Chronicle of Higher Education 47.28 (2001): B15–B16. 31. Ibid. 32. Julie Ann Smith, “Review of Academic Conferences,” Society & Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies 9.3 (2001): 293–97, esp. 294, available online at www.psyeta.org/sa/sa9.3/smith.shtml. 33. Erica Fudge, “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), 3–18, esp. 6. 34. Steve Baker, “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Animals, Representation, and Reality,” Society & Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies 9.3 (2001): 189–201, esp. 193, available online at www.psyeta.org/sa/sa9.3/baker.shtml. 35. Smith, “Review of Academic Conferences,” 295. 36. Ibid., 297; Baker, “Guest Editor’s Introduction,” 195. 37. Fudge, “A Left-Handed Blow,” 6. 38. Ibid., 15. 39. Marvin, “Guest Editor’s Introduction,” 6–7. 40. Bergman, “Making Animals Matter.” 41. Ibid.

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Wolves in Sheep’s (and Others’) Clothing

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ga r ry m a rvin

Jesus warned his followers, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”1 For the metaphor to make sense, Jesus depended on his listeners’ local understanding that wolves were a threat to flocks of sheep—an everyday problem for many shepherds. But wolves did not, at that or any other time, ever prey on sheep in the ways that ungodly men preyed on a vulnerable religious flock of humans. Wolves were not consciously engaged in vicious, inappropriate, or immoral behavior when they killed and ate the sheep belonging to the shepherds, even if it was always configured that way. Wolves have never clothed themselves; they have neither put on nor removed disguises according to the occasion. Yet in an important sense, they have always been clothed, with their naked animal ways dressed up to suit human needs, moralities, and fantasies. Whenever and wherever humans have paid attention to them, wolves have been enfolded in human culture. So it has been for all animals throughout history. Being clothed in culture is a condition from which it is almost impossible for them to escape, except by escaping human attention altogether and being what they are rather than what humans believe them to be and force them to become. Communities of wolves have intersected with communities of humans for millennia. Humans have hunted alongside wolves in search of similar prey; wolves have drawn close to human sett lements, and some have even been incorporated into their social groups. When humans domesticated livestock, 59

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gar ry marvin

Wolf in shepherd’s clothing. (From a drawing by Verlat in the Illustrated Times [London], 1862)

wolves also drew close to these animals as a source of food and were themselves hunted as a result. Is it possible to disentangle the long mutual histories of wolves and humans and to discern an animal nature independent of any relation to humans? In other words, can there be histories of wolves, or any other animal species, populations, or societies, that go beyond wolves’ 60

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Wolves in Sheep’s (and Others’) Clothing

intersections with human activities and concerns? Hence, to what would, could, or should histories of animals pay attention?2 My central aim in this essay is to outline some of the complexities of writing about animals from the perspective of the humanities and particularly issues related to writing histories of animals. I have pluralized the latter terms because I fi nd it impossible to conceive of a single history of animals in the same way that I fi nd it impossible to conceive of a single history of humans. It is simply too vast in the singular. For thousands of years, historians across the globe have chronicled and explored the life of only one species, but they have had to reduce their studies to particular peoples in specific historical time frames. Even broad historical surveys have not been able to consider all human societies everywhere. If the task of writing the history of just one species is an impossibility, I cannot imagine historians will ever possess the breadth of knowledge to write about the thousands of species of nonhuman animals now existing on the planet and for this to be the history of animals. In keeping with my concern to maintain the particularities (however defi ned) of the animals whose histories we might seek to write, I have confi ned my attention here to the members of one species that is named the gray wolf or Canis lupus (at least it is so named by some people). Because my arguments here will not be about the complexities of taxonomies and their implications nor about naming and identities derived from naming, I will use wolf and wolves for the sake of an artificial simplicity but always having in mind that these are names given to them by particular humans and never taken from them or taken by them; to themselves, wolves are un-named. In recent years, the study of human-animal relations has emerged as a new field of interest within the humanities. Although it has emerged, it has still not fully defi ned itself. One can perhaps discern a certain shape developing, but the field is still a fuzzy one, and it certainly does not warrant the term discipline, which would suggest a particular corpus of knowledge, particular methods of investigation, particular modes of instruction, and a proprietary academic demarcation and defi nition of territory. In my view, that fuzziness is a strength rather than a weakness, for it offers the potential for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiry and for the richness of such comparative perspectives. There is, however, a general problem of what is at the core of this field of inquiry as well as a specific problem with how the animal side of human-animal relations might be studied. Should the relationships formed between humans and animals be studied from the points of view of humans, from the points of view of animals, or both? Do we in the humanities have the techniques and competencies to examine both sides of such relationships? 61

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Can the humanities, developed over centuries to study humans and their societies and cultures, be extended to study animals, or can they be used to study only the relationships that humans have with other animals? My view is that such studies can be situated only at the point of relationships and that these relationships must themselves be specifically situated. In the literature emerging from this field, there is certainly a concern with how animals have been represented, thought about, related to, and treated; but there is litt le, if anything, about animals’ ways of being when these are not directly linked with humans or even when they are. Inevitably, historical narratives of their relationship focus more on humans than on animals. Working from the perspectives of the humanities, researchers are not generally equipped with the expertise to write about the animals themselves or the animals’ side of the relationship except in human terms. An essential question for me, then, is what sorts of animals might we be referring to in these relationships? The answers to this question are important for considering how we might study them. I certainly believe we need to consider such a question before we can think about what the histories of animals might be, could be, or even should be. My view is that the creatures of interest to those of us in the humanities are always socially and culturally constructed: animals that, in terms of our interests and perspectives, have only a tangential relationship with the animals in and of themselves. I do not believe that scholars in the humanities can have much, or anything, of significance to say about animals outside any human context. Although I want to maintain a strong sociocultural constructivist view of animals, I am not denying the embodied and experienced existence of animals beyond such constructions: social constructions are always constructions of something, and such constructions have significant consequences for living animals.3 I am, however, extremely skeptical about whether we can gain any access to those animals themselves from the perspectives of the humanities because such disciplines are always human-centered—they are the projects of humans. Although I can imagine humanities studies of animals that are not anthropocentric, in the sense of not regarding humans as the center of the universe, I cannot conceive how they might be produced in any but a human way and with human concerns at their center—even if that human concern is for the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of animals. Perhaps it indicates a poverty of imagination on my part, but I cannot, for example, imagine a history of wolf-elk relations being written in, or expressed in, wolfish or elkish terms. I think that the possibility of understanding animals (rather than rela62

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Wolves in Sheep’s (and Others’) Clothing

tionships with animals) involves, demands, and depends on minimizing or circumventing the human perspective. To achieve either of these aims, we must turn to the insights of colleagues in disciplines such as biology, zoology, animal psychology, and ethology. Although such animal sciences are themselves social and cultural practices in terms of how their research is conceived, conducted, and written, and can have no claim to being the only representation of real animals or of any real/true representation of animals, they do at least attempt to gain some sort of direct access to animals and how they are in the world.4 If I am interested in the social lives of wolves, the hunting practices of cheetahs, the migration patterns of birds, or the breeding habits of seals, I do not turn to the humanities for enlightenment but to the work of those researchers who attempt to understand how animal bodies function, how they relate to their environments, and how they behave. Even here, though, it is impossible to avoid humans altogether. The social life of wolves is, in part, determined by the proximity of humans and where they have permitted wolves to live. The hunting practices of cheetahs in a national park can be influenced by the intrusion of tourists. Birds may have to alter their migration routes because of climate change and encroaching human sett lements. Marine environments polluted by human activity may influence the breeding habits of seals. Many animals cannot but be in the world in relation to humans. Are we, though, from our perspectives of the humanities, interested in biological, zoological, ethological, ecological animals at all? Or rather, are we interested in these aspects of animals and their lives? What might we want to know about animals that scientific studies do not or cannot offer and that humanistic studies might be able to supply? Animals already have a history—although one neither sanctioned, owned, nor authored by them; it is the natural history written by humans and also enshrined in museums—but the implications of imagining another kind of history for them and of them are both numerous and complex, not only with respect to the nature of the animals we might be attempting to historicize but also for the sorts of history/ies we are interested in writing. Perhaps there is one sort of animal history that we are not interested in writing, and that is a scientific history of animals. For example, zooarchaeologists can offer histories of wolves. Long-dead wolves have left remains of their bodies in the environments in which they once lived. These remains, historical records, can be scrutinized and interpreted to offer a long evolutionary view in terms of the emergence of the fi rst wolfl ike creatures, morphological changes, the spread of wolves across the globe, and perhaps even speculations about changes in wolf behavior, social life, and interactions 63

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with other animals.5 Th is is certainly a history of wolves. So would be, for example, a recent study that looked at patterns of genetic variability in Scandinavian wolves between 1829 and 1979, a period when wolves were severely persecuted by humans:

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We examined historical patterns of genetic variability throughout the period of decline, from 1829 to 1979. Contemporary Finnish wolves, considered to be representative of a large eastern wolf population, were used for comparison. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variability among historical Scandinavian wolves was significantly lower than in Finland while Y chromosome variability was comparable between the two populations. Th is may suggest that long-distance migration from the east has been male-biased. Importantly though, as the historical population was significantly differentiated from contemporary Finnish wolves, the overall immigration rate to the Scandinavian peninsula appears to have been low. Levels of variability at autosomnal microsatellite loci were high in the 1800s but declined considerably towards the mid-twentieth century. At this time, approximately 40% of the allelic diversity and 30% of the heterozygosity had been lost. After 1940, however, there is evidence of several immigration events, coinciding with episodes of marked population increase in Russian Karelia and subsequent westwards migration.6

Such a history is important for those curious about the nature of the wolves that presently live in Scandinavia. It tells them, in part, what sorts of wolves they are and where they came from. It gives clues as to the histories of families, packs, and other identities. Perhaps male wolves were expelled from packs in the east as a result of hierarchy disputes; perhaps they left in search of potential mates and were able to establish themselves in areas in which previous populations had been extirpated by humans. Wolves in Scandinavia are then the result of processes of human politics—persecution, eradication, and enforced migrations—and also of wolf politics: individuals leaving packs, breeding patterns, migration, and colonization. These present-day wolves have a past (perhaps a history) that can be reconstructed and explained using scientific data. But is this the sort of history of animals in which we are interested, and are these wolves themselves actually the focus of our attention? Are we interested in the history of these fleshy, hunting, breeding, and migrating wolves? We might be, but I am not sure that we can actually study them or write about them with any claim to expertise or specialist knowledge. Such studies should be left to those who spend their lives studying material wolves, though they certainly should not be ignored by us. They should be of vital importance for those of us in the humanities who claim an interest in animals. 64

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Wolves in Sheep’s (and Others’) Clothing

If our claim really is one of an interest in animals, then we should attempt to know our subjects as well as possible within the limitations and difficulties of interspecies understanding. Scientific studies of animals are cultural representations, but they do attempt to foreground how animals are for themselves, and they do emerge, in the main, from a direct experience of, or a direct encounter with, embodied—sometimes living, sometimes dead— animals. Once again, however, my suggestion is that we in the humanities can write only about the social and cultural wolves that are imagined and constructed from such biological wolves and then imposed back on them. We are able to comment only on the human side of the relationship—that is, on how wolves have been experienced, imagined, and represented, and how their behavior has been interpreted in terms of human concerns. To understand how humans have been experienced, imagined, and represented and how their behavior has been interpreted in terms of wolf preoccupations—a wolf history—is, I think, impossible to understand. It might be imagined, but it would be fiction rather than history. So, we do not have the capacity to write about wolves themselves, wolf being, or wolf behavior; we are unable to write social histories of wolves but only social histories of the intertwinings of wolf and human lives. Even here, though, while the humans might be specific and specified, the wolves are likely to remain general.7 In a much-cited article that has generated a wealth of further articles, John Berger asks, “Why look at animals?”—an important question if we seek to understand and comment on human-animal relations, but, as I have suggested elsewhere, it is not one that Berger answers.8 One of the problems lies in the generality of the question. People in general do not simply look at animals in general. Different people look at individual animals or groups of animals, of many different kinds, at different times, in different spaces, places, and environments in a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes. To understand the natures and purposes of the relationships involved, it is necessary to understand their complex specificities. Different people need to, or wish to, look at animals because they are engaged with them for a multiplicity of reasons—because they are, among other things, raised and used for food, clothing, and transport; treated as pests or pets; viewed in fi lms, documentaries, circuses, zoos, and museums; sacrificed in scientific experiments and religious practices; pursued by animal watchers and trophy hunters; tamed and trained; bred for work, for show, or for competition. Hence, the question “Why look at animals?” needs to be answered in terms of needs, wants, desires, and pleasures, among other things. But in order to begin to fully understand these relationships, it is also necessary to specify how and where 65

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they take place. A fi nal element that might well be important here in terms of the specificities of relationships is that such relationships may not be simply dyadic—that is, between humans and a particular animal or species—but may instead involve and perhaps be mediated through other animal relationships. For example, shepherds’ att itudes toward wolves are understandable only in the context of wolves intruding into the relationship that shepherds have with their sheep, just as the att itudes of national-park managers toward wolves are only fully understandable in the context of their responsibility for herds of ungulates on which wolves prey. My present research centers on what might be termed a cultural history (as opposed to a natural history) of wolves. Very broadly, I am exploring the range, diversity, and complexity of how wolves have been configured in different societies and cultures at different times. The wolf is an ideal species for this purpose because, as the most widely distributed of all land mammals, apart from humans, wolves have intersected with a wide and complex range of human societies, cultures, and lives.9 What is particularly fascinating to me is that wolves are, or have been, revered in some cultures but feared and loathed in others, a sacred creature of the benign wilderness for some people but an abhorrent monster of dark forces for others, regarded as noble hunters or common criminals, admired as warriors or reviled as abject cowards, provoking terror as creatures into which humans can be transformed or wondered at as creatures that can nurture orphaned human children.10 What might be the significances of the social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental contexts in which particular representations are produced, and is it possible to discern any patterns in such representations? The how of such a study is relatively easy—one can simply collect examples of such representations and marvel at the multifaceted and culturally rich wolf that emerges—but this is litt le more than a listing reminiscent of an antiquarian, folkloric enterprise. More challenging is to attempt an analysis or interpretation of the conditions of why such representations emerge among different groups of people at different times. Here I am trying to puzzle through the complex feedback systems that loop between the representations and constructions that create the conditions or contexts for relationships with embodied animals in the world and the relationships themselves that create or generate representations which then create . . . Relationships out of representations, representations out of relationships. Such feedback systems are neither timeless, fi xed, nor mechanical, however; and it is necessary to consider carefully how and why social, economic, political, and

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Wolves in Sheep’s (and Others’) Clothing

cultural changes within human societies and the continuities and changes of how animals behave in their worlds give rise to new representations and relations.

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•••

In this section, I sketch out some aspects of one element of this wolf project—the construction of wolves as animals that present problems for certain groups of people, who in consequence seek to kill them, perhaps even to exterminate them. I will offer two short case studies—one from fi rsthand ethnographic research and the second from the work of other researchers—of how human-wolf relations are embedded in wider socioeconomic and cultural processes and are enacted in specific environments. Both of these examples suggest that one cannot understand how particular people construct images of one animal species, and interact with members of that species, without also exploring how these animals interact with other animals that are significant to the people concerned and examining the nature of the spaces in which these relationships occur. In the following cases, att itudes to wolves have developed largely in the context of pastoral relationships that people have with domestic animals, especially sheep, although there are other animals involved in both cases, relationships that are intruded on by wolves. My fi rst example comes from the Kurvelesh Mountains in southern Albania, where I conducted a short fieldwork-based study in 2002 with the anthropologist and Albanologist Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers. Ferdinand Begu, a zoologist at the Natural History Museum in Tirana, estimates that there are between 900 and 1,200 wolves in Albania—a large population for a country of just under 29,000 square miles (12,000 square kilometers).11 They inhabit all parts of the country (with the exception of urban areas and coastal lowlands in the west), and they certainly inhabit forests and mountains (70 percent of the country) where people work. Wolves are therefore not, for rural dwellers, creatures of the remote, the far, the distant, but creatures whose lives regularly intersect with human lives and concerns. Wolf-prey species, such as deer, have been almost eliminated in the country, and Begu has suggested that the main food supply for wolves is domesticated livestock, such as sheep and goats. The goal of this limited ethnographic study was to understand how shepherds in this part of Albania perceived, conceived, viewed, constructed, and experienced wolves. Here our research was conducted in the small mountain village of Fterra, which is home to approximately eighty families.12 The main agricultural activity within the village is small-scale

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horticulture, but residents also practice sheep and goat husbandry. These animals are raised for their milk, much of which is used to produce cheese, rather than for meat. During the summer months, groups of men take their own flocks and those of others into the high mountains, where they stay with the sheep for several months; in winter, they shepherd them near the village. In the village, other men, and often women, take the goats out daily to graze. Ferdinand Begu states that the “[w]olf is considered by most of the public a dangerous and damaging animal. Confl ict of man and wolf is deeply rooted in the rural population, due to the fact that the wolf is a permanent danger to their livestock, both during summer and winter grazing.”13 Th is general attitude was confi rmed in our research. All the shepherds and everyone else in the village with whom we spoke expressed a deep hatred of wolves stemming from the attacks that the wolves have made on their small, but immensely valuable, flocks of animals. Even more disturbing to them were the few occasions when wolves came into the village at night and att acked and killed mules and donkeys. One villager commented that this was like having saved up to purchase a Mercedes only to have it vandalized or destroyed. In a poor community such as Fterra, this was a significant comparison. The wolf was generally characterized as a thief, a raider, a murderer, a vicious killer, a violator, and a dishonorable animal. The wolf was never described as a neutral animal following its biological nature: it was an enemy, one who perpetrated a crime and who was thus, in the shepherds’ eyes, culpable. In many societies where wolves prey on domestic stock, the animal is thought of in similarly negative terms, but what interested me was the cultural specificity with which these negative terms were expressed. In this case, what were the specific constructions of the wolf that made it an Albanian wolf rather than simply a wolf living in Albania? The wolf of these shepherds was a cultural wolf that was involved in very particular, locally configured, social relationships with them. There was no biological/zoological wolf here at all. The wolf was configured, and responded to, in terms that would be used, in similar circumstances, for humans—it was constructed out of human identities and images. These notions of intruder, thief, raider, violator are immensely important in a society and culture that has strong guiding principles of honor, particularly personal and family honor and hospitality, that govern relationships between people. As with other mountain villagers in Albania, our respondents in Fterra took pride in person and place and were concerned with preserving the integrity of their person, their family, their house, their village, and their property, including livestock and pastures. Such concerns are part of a complex code of honor that consists of ndera (the honor of economic success and provision68

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ing), besa (social honor, protection, and generosity to non-kin), and burrnija (manliness, especially in the sense of defending and protecting). In the various historical customary codes of the pastoral mountain societies of Albania, a number of rules highlighted the significance of protecting personal, social, and spatial boundaries and outline specific penalties for those who transgress them.14 I delineate here a few key aspects of these codes that related to human outsiders and strangers in order to consider how Albanian shepherds respond to the wolf as an intruding outsider.15 According to the historical ideal-type prescriptions, outsiders could be temporarily incorporated into the moral universe of this society by being treated as guests. The processes here were of a ritual integration into the family or village, that is, into the confi nes of familiarity and the moral community, through codes of hospitality that both honor the guest and protect the hosts from him. Both the host and the guest knew what was expected of them, and they began with precaution. The code known as the Kanun of Leke Dukagjin states that no outsider may simply enter a house. The guest had to announce his arrival by calling out from the courtyard and wait there until he was led in.16 He was greeted, his weapon was taken, and he was brought inside the house, where he was given a place of honor and could expect to receive food and drink in the center of this domestic space. What he could not do was to enter the kitchen and lift the lid from the pot to see what was being offered. He could not take from the host family but had to wait to be served, to receive from them. All strangers incorporated into the family via purification or domestication rites were designated “friends.” The “friend” was entitled to every protection the host could provide, and any injury done to him might provoke a blood feud. By contrast, a stranger who was not ritually domesticated according to this protocol was considered not only potentially threatening but a potential enemy, against whom vigilance was needed, and who, if necessary, would be confronted and resisted if he committed an offense. According to the same Albanian historical social codes, a man’s personal honor was challenged or violated “if someone breaks into his house, his sheepfold, his silo, or his milk-shed in his courtyard.”17 Such transgressions could require the killing of the offender in order to restitute a man’s honor. What is provided here is only a simplified account of the historical roots that, in part, underpin the extremely complex rules that still govern hospitality and relationships with strangers in Albania’s mountain areas today, but this description offers a starting point for understanding how and why the wolf is such a hated animal.18 The wolf is an outsider, a stranger, who comes 69

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out of the wild and takes what does not belong to him. It is thus drawn into the moral universe of humans and enters the dialectics of honor that govern the relationships between people. The wolf violates all possibilities of being welcomed as a stranger who can be “ritually domesticated” (in contrast to the dog, which can be domesticated and integrated)—it comes without announcing itself, it keeps its weapons, it takes rather than waits to be served, it decides what it would like to eat, and it is a destroyer within the domestic space. The wolf is a stranger, an Other, the wild outsider who continues to be wild and does not succumb to domestication and incorporation. In the case of humans breaking the codes of hospitality, the violated person traditionally has recourse to a series of prescribed actions that allow him to eradicate the wrong done to him, to reestablish his personal sense of honor and the honor and integrity of his family. If his sheep were stolen by a human thief, a shepherd would seek punishment, retribution, and revenge. The problem for the shepherd in dealing with the wolf/thief today is that he does not have recourse to such measures. In an attempt to control violence, the Albanian government has made the private ownership of fi rearms illegal, and shepherds expressed their annoyance, frustration, and anger that they were not permitted to have shotguns or rifles with which to protect their flocks. Th is could be interpreted, in local cultural terms, as an “emasculation” by the government, which is taking away what is rightfully theirs as men, the item most important in the defense of honor—the weapon. The shepherd can neither prevent depredation nor right the wrong of the violation—he cannot retaliate nor can he extract retribution. Intriguingly, shepherds told us that although they can put out poison to kill wolves (and this was certainly done during Communist times), they did not like to do this because they might accidentally kill their dogs, but also because they did not think that this was the appropriate way to kill wolves. At the moment it is only possible to offer a tentative interpretation of this. While poisoning kills wolves, it does so at one remove from the person laying the poison, and it does so indiscriminately. With poison, an individual shepherd does not confront an individual wolf and use his individual skill to kill it as he would with a gun. If the shepherd is able to shoot a wolf prior to any attack, then he has preemptively defended what is his, and if he shoots a wolf that he considers to be responsible for an attack, then he has directly responded to the attack and exacted revenge for it. There was certainly the sense that the shepherds felt reduced as proper shepherds and proper men because these attacks on their sheep were, in an important sense, interpreted as attacks on themselves. The shepherds exhib70

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Wolves in Sheep’s (and Others’) Clothing

ited no fatalistic att itude about the inevitability of some losses when they take the flocks into the mountains. Wolves were not regarded as simply a natural hazard associated with shepherding. Although the shepherds could do litt le to prevent such attacks—apart from being ever-vigilant—they wanted to be able to do something. They felt powerless, and this was not an acceptable position for men. There was also a strong sense that the threat from the wolf was also a threat to the status of being human—in conjunction with the threat to personal and family honor, as would be the case if someone were to successfully steal from another’s flocks. In this society where state control and protection was, at the time, fragile or nonexistent, the complex codes and rhetoric of integrity, honor, and respect were the basis of local peace. Individuals had to take responsibility for life and death, but the wolf did not pay attention to this as men would. Where the strongest or the most powerful could dominate others, the wolf was a serious problem. The wolf was superior to the shepherd because it dared to intrude, because it did not obey the local social codes. In this way, it was similar to locally powerful men who could take with impunity because they were unlikely to be challenged. These wolves of the Kurvelesh Mountains were specifically Albanian wolves, not simply wolves in Albania. The views of them were shaped by the same social, cultural, economic, political, and historical processes that had shaped the people who had views about them and the desire and need to repel or punish them were governed by local social and cultural ideas. Although Albanian shepherds wanted to eradicate wolves from Albania, they had neither the means to do so themselves nor the political and social power to construct the wolves as a problem and demand from others the wolves’ control or eradication. The wolves of Albania had a low public profi le, and their local sociocultural construction had litt le impact on how and where they lived; their existence seemed unthreatened by human concerns. In contrast, my next short example describes a case where the viability of the entire wolf population within a national, human, territory is threatened because of the ways in which the wolves have become entangled in human political concerns. In Norway, wolves have become highly politicized animals that feature in a major political controversy. As a result of hunting and other forms of killing from the eighteenth century onward, wolves were thought to have been practically eliminated from the country by the mid-1960s. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, individual wolves were observed along the Norwegian-Swedish border, and during the 1980s, wolves began to reestab71

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lish themselves in the Scandinavian peninsula (they had protected status— since 1966 in Sweden and since 1972 in Norway—and their numbers had increased). The numbers of wolves involved in this new colonization was not great, with perhaps thirty-nine individuals present by 1990 and ninety-two by 1999; many of these were not permanent residents in Norway.19 By the end of the twentieth century, there were estimated to be approximately two dozen wolves living permanently in Norway, a country that the wolf specialists at the Centre for Biological Diversity claimed could sustain between two hundred and five hundred wolves. But even this extremely small population was too great for some people. By 2000, Norwegian sheep farmers, hunters, and landowners were increasingly angered by the presence of wolves in their country.20 For over a half century, sheep farmers had been accustomed to turning their sheep to graze in forests and mountains without any human protection, safe in the knowledge that there were no carnivores to attack them. They claimed that they were losing large numbers of sheep to predators such as lynx and bears and particularly to wolves. Figures vary for how many sheep were killed annually by wolves, but compensation payments for sheep deaths att ributed to wolves was made for between six hundred and eight hundred animals.21 Such compensation, however, was not enough for the sheep farmers. They did not want simply to receive compensation for the wolves’ victims; they wanted the culprits punished. But the wolves were protected by law. It seems that wolf predation was not configured and experienced simply as an attack on sheep, but as an attack on sheep farmers themselves, an attack on their efforts, their work, and their relationships with their sheep. Sheep were raised for human consumption, not for wolf consumption, and although money was paid for the loss of the sheep, the sheep farmers thought it still fundamentally wrong for wolves to benefit from human endeavors. Hunters and forest owners were also opposed to wolves because they preyed on moose—animals they wanted to hunt or, in the case of forest owners, to exploit by selling hunting rights to others. Hunters were also angry because they felt they could not hunt game birds, hare, and other animals in areas where wolves might be present because they needed their dogs to hunt with them and they were afraid that wolves would kill them because they, the hunters, were not permitted to shoot them in the case of an att ack. Sheep farmers and hunters did not seem to blame wolves for attempting to feed themselves by whatever means possible, but what did concern them was that they could not take action against them. Not only were they members of a protected species, but they were also members of a species that other, largely 72

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Wolves in Sheep’s (and Others’) Clothing

nonrural people, championed as endangered, charismatic, and representing a spirit of wilderness. As one landowner, speaking in a BBC Radio documentary, commented of the wolf in general: “It’s a very strong symbol. We don’t want it; the State says it should be here and you just have to take it. The symbol effect of the wolf is very strong.”22 Unlike the Albanian shepherds, the Norwegians who opposed the wolves’ presence were able to exert political influence, and in 2000–2001, the government agreed to a cull of the twentyfive wolves in the country. As a result, ten wolves were killed from two packs, and the breeding pair of a third pack was killed (one was shot and the other killed by a train). Further culls were carried out in the next few years, most recently in the winter of 2004–5, when five wolves of an estimated twenty were shot: a quarter of the national population.23 In mid-2006, it was estimated that five small, reproducing packs of wolves remained in Norway and a total population of between sixteen to nineteen animals (although only two of these packs have territories completely inside the country).24 A wolf war is now being fought in Norway on multiple fronts. On the international and national fronts, the culls have provoked angry responses from wolf biologists, ecologists, pro-wildlife activists, and those who love wolves. Interestingly, at the local level the opposite has often been the case. In the Norwegian rural communities where wolves exist, there has been strong support for the culls, such that in 1999 an anticarnivore alliance was established to fight against the protection of such animals. Despite, and in the face of, conservationist and protectionist arguments that Norway has enough wilderness space for what is perceived as an original native species that should be accepted as an integral and necessary part of the ecosystem and the biodiversity of the country, those who are opposed to wolves assert their own, rather more original, arguments for their eradication.25 As might be expected, many rural Norwegians express anger about the loss of livestock and the loss of game animals to wolf predation, and some express the fear of potential wolf attacks on humans when working or walking in the forests or even within human sett lements. Despite this, they seem less antagonistic to actual, physical wolves than to “the wolf,” a creature they believe has been imagined and created by those who seek to protect it. The Norwegian sociologists Ketil Skogen and Olve Krange, who have studied the anticarnivore movement, show that the efforts of the alliance—made up, in the main, of sheep farmers; hunters who resent the loss of game animals (particularly moose) and their hunting dogs to wolves; and landowners who lease the hunting rights to their land—are directed not only against the wolves themselves but also against those whom these rural dwellers see as 73

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threats to their communities.26 Sheep farmers, for example, fear that if wolves make raising sheep unprofitable, people will stop farming and move out of the area to seek other employment, which would help bring about the demise of rural communities. The alliance is held together by a concern to maintain what its members regard as a traditional way of life, which is threatened less by the individual wolves that prey on their flocks than by the legislation that protects the wolf species and by the conservationists, zoologists, and urban residents who promote it. As Skogen and Krange point out, it is this coalition of outsiders and the restrictions it seeks to impose that rural dwellers resent more than the wolves themselves. They understand that wolves are only following their wolf nature; what they object to is being unable to take what they regard as appropriate measures in response. For the alliance members, these wolves are, in a significant sense, “urban” wolves, created, maintained, and protected by (largely) urban outsiders. They consider such outsiders to be romantic about “nature,” having lost contact with the basic facts of human existence and having no understanding of, or compassion for, rural living. Interestingly, protectionist and conservation organizations and other environmental agencies are here regarded as evil conglomerates—a view that such agencies often have of their opponents. Skogen and Krange show how wolves feature in this social, cultural, and political context as city animals: A pivotal element in the hunters’ general interpretation of their situation is that they are up against powerful enemies that do not understand—or are oblivious to—the consequences of current land-use regimes. They describe them as “city people” and “extremists.” Consequently, the appearance of wolves is associated with cities and an urban conception of nature. In their minds, that is a romantic view based on a dream-like glorification of untouched nature, and it does not pay heed to the actual consequences for real people. Th rough this construction, the wolf becomes an icon of urbanity. In the hunters’ world, that is the ultimate antagonism of the life they love. The wolves thus symbolize att acks on the community not from encroaching wilderness, as one might believe, but from cities. And that is why it is doubly important to reinforce the symbolic defense line, so that the arch-enemies are held at bay at all costs.27

Once again, as with the Albanian case, these wolves are not simply members of Canis lupus going about their natural business. They are real enough, but that is not what is important or significant to those people who feel that their lives are intruded on by wolves. In order to write histories of wolves in Albania and Norway, it would be necessary to explore further, in much greater detail and depth, the complex webs of relationships that connect animal and human lives. One would need 74

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Wolves in Sheep’s (and Others’) Clothing

to attend to a variety of perspectives on the relationships between people and the natural world; to the sociocultural configurations of the spaces, places, and environments in which the relationships between animals and humans occur; to moral and religious systems; to the political economy of animal husbandry; and to the sociopolitical relationships between different groups of people. We can write about such relationships from the perspectives of the humanities because they are human concerns, which we can attempt to understand. What we cannot hope to understand, or even imagine, are wolfish perspectives on such issues. For millennia, wolves have been clothed in human culture, and I suggest that there is no possibility of, and indeed no point in, stripping away these layers of cultural clothing in an effort to reveal true or real animals that might lie beneath them. From the perspectives of the humanities, the real animal is the cultural animal. Humans do not become more interesting or reveal themselves more truly when their cultural clothing is removed, and the humanities would have litt le or nothing significant to say about such naked, acultural creatures. I think that the same holds for nonhuman creatures, which is not to suggest that wolves and their worlds are uninteresting—far from it; and there are plenty of scientists who are better trained and placed to analyze and interpret other animal worlds and to present them to us in all their rich animal complexities. What historians can offer are delineations of human-animal intersections by examining the multifaceted interactions of particular peoples with particular species and individual animals. Only through such studies as these will we be able to recognize and explain how animals have shaped our histories as we have shaped theirs.

Notes I would like to thank Dorothee Brantz, Rebecca Cassidy, Robert Davis, and Donna Landry for their careful critical readings of earlier versions of this essay and for their invaluable criticisms, comments, and suggestions. Ferdinand Begu was most generous in allowing me to consult and make use of his unpublished research on wolves in Albania. Special thanks are due to Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, who took me to meet shepherds, although alas not wolves, in Albania and for allowing me to make extensive use of her ideas and publications. 1. Holy Bible, New Testament, Matt hew 7:15 (King James Version). 2. For an excellent exploration of issues relating to the writing of the history of animals or animal histories, see Erica Fudge, “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2002), 3–18. 3. See, for example, Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore and 75

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gar ry marvin London, 1980); and Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). 4. See, for example, Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London, 1989); and Nicholas Jardine, Jim Secord, and Emma Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge, U.K., 1996), which explore the social and cultural nature of natural histories. 5. Ronald M. Nowak, “Wolf Evolution and Taxonomy,” in Wolves: Behavior, Ecology and Conservation, ed. L. David Mech and Luigi Boitani, 239–58 (Chicago and London, 2003). 6. Øystein Flagstad, C. W. Walker, C. Vilà, A. K Sundqvist, B. Fernholm, A. K. Huft hammer, Ø. Wiig, I. Koyola, and H. Ellegree, “Two Centuries of the Scandinavian Wolf Population: Patterns of Genetic Variability and Migration during an Era of Dramatic Decline,” Molecular Ecology 12.4 (2003): 869–80 (quote on 869). 7. There might be exceptions to this general claim, such as the cases of individual wolves in the early 1900s in the United States that were given names, treated as renegades and bandits, and hunted down and killed for their crimes (see Stanley P. Young, The Last of the Loners [New York and Toronto, 1970]). 8. John Berger, About Looking (London, 1980), 1–26. For a fuller, more complex critique, see Garry Marvin, “Seeing, Looking, Watching, Observing Nonhuman Animals,” Society and Animals 13 (2005): 1–11. 9. Mech and Boitani, eds., Wolves, xv–xvii. 10. For a selection of such representations, see Jon T. Colman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven and London, 2004); Bruce Hampton, The Great American Wolf (New York, 1997); John Knight, Waiting for Wolves in Japan: An Anthropological Study of People-Wildlife Relations (Oxford, 2003); Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York, 1978); and Brett L. Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan (Seatt le, 2005). 11. Th is information comes from my personal communication with Ferdinand Begu in 2002 and 2003 and from some of his unpublished work, but see Ferdinand Begu, Nikolla Peja, and Stavri Pllaha, “Large Carnivores in Albania (Bear, Lynx and Wolf),” in Protected Area in the Southern Balkans (Hellenic Ministry of the Environment, Physical Planning, and Public Works: Thessaloniki, 2002), 73–79. According to Begu, the government overestimates the numbers by between 30 and 60 percent. He suggests this might be because it would like to promote wolf-hunting as a revenue-raising enterprise. I have discussed Begu’s figures with biologists who suggest that his estimates are extremely high for such a small country. At present there is no research on the wolf population in Albania that can confi rm or challenge these estimates. 12. During a second research trip in 2003, we also interviewed shepherds near the town of Peshkopi, in the northern Albanian mountains. Again we were interested in their att itudes towards wolves. For a socioeconomic study of Fterra, see Karl Kaser, Robert Pichler, Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, eds., Die weite Welt und 76 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:30:32.

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Wolves in Sheep’s (and Others’) Clothing das Dorf: Albanische Emigration am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 2002). 13. Begu, Peja, and Pllaha, “Large Carnivores in Albania,” 77. 14. The best-known of these Albanian customary codes is the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjin, which in the early twentieth century was produced as an artificially structured printed text based on a particular oral account. Th is Kanun actually applies to parts of the northern Albanian mountains where there are pastoral societies not fundamentally different from the pastoral societies in the mountains of the south. In my preliminary research, I was testing whether the cultural principles that underpin this Kanun regarding persons, animals, boundaries, houses, and property also give rise to the representations of, and responses to, wolves in the south. I stress this point, which might seem minor, because of my overall concern about local specificity (see The Code of Lekë Dukagjini, trans. Leonard Fox [New York, 1989]). A comparison between southern and northern historical codes can be found in Ismet Elezi, E Drejta zakonore e Laberise ne Planin krahasues (Tirana, 1994). 15. Th roughout this section on Albania, I have relied extensively on the ethnographic and anthropological experience and knowledge of Stephanie SchwandnerSievers. In particular, I have drawn on her article “Humiliation and Reconciliation in Northern Albania: The Logics of Feuding in Symbolic and Diachronic Perspectives,” in Dynamics of Violence: Processes of Escalation and De-Escalation in Violent Group Conflicts, ed. Georg Elwert, Stephan Feuchtwang, and Dieter Neubert, 133–52 (Berlin, 1999), in which she explores issues relating to social relationships and these customary codes. 16. The masculine pronoun he is used throughout this section because that is how the guest or stranger is generically referred to in this text. 17. The Code of Lekë Dukagjini, 132 18. All references here to the present should be regarded as the “ethnographic present” of 2002–3, when the fieldwork was conducted. I have not been able to return to this site to explore whether att itudes to wolves and the means of wolf control have changed in recent years. 19. See, for example, Marianne Linder Olsen, Causes of Mortality of Free-Ranging Scandinavian Grey Wolves (Tromsø, 2003); Petter Wabakken, Håkan Sand, Olof Liberg, and Anders Bjärvall, “The Recovery, Distribution, and Population Dynamics of Wolves on the Scandinavian Peninsula, 1978–1998,” Canadian Journal of Zoology 79 (2001): 710–25; and the Web site of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, www.nina.no, for various reports on wolf population trends. 20. I have used the term sheep farmers rather than shepherds because this is how these people identify themselves, and because it suggests that their practices differ from those of shepherds, who tend their flocks every day. 21. See, for example, the Norwegian Ministry of Environment Web site: htt p:// odin.dep.no/odinarkiv/english/stoltenberg. 77 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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22. Transcribed from BBC Radio 4, Wild Europe, July 8, 2002, www.bbc.co.uk/ radio4/science/wildeurope_20020708.shtml. 23. I am indebted to Dr. Scott Brainerd at the Norsk Institutt for Naturforskniing (Norwegian Institute for Nature Research) in Trondheim for this information about culling. 24. See also the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research Report 117 (2005). 25. See, for example, Jo Kleiven et al., “Factors Influencing the Social Acceptability of Large Carnivore Behaviours,” Biodiversity and Conservation 1 (2004): 1647–58. 26. Skogen Ketil and Olve Krange, “A Wolf at the Gate: The Anti-Carnivore Alliance and the Symbolic Construction of Community,” Sociologica Ruralis 43.3 (2003): 309–25. 27. Ibid., 320.

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PART II

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Acculturating Wild Creatures

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Darwin in the Monkey Cage The Zoological Garden as a Medium of Evolutionary Theory

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On 2 October 1878, a long-awaited shipment of eighty-two animals from East Africa and Southeast Asia arrived in Vienna, accompanied by much fanfare in the press.1 The newcomers—including tigers, porcupines, antelopes, a boa constrictor, and several exotic birds—allegedly drew between forty and fi ft y thousand visitors to the Schönbrunn Menagerie the fi rst Sunday they were on display.2 The chief att raction was a young female orangutan, whose movements were said to be “damn human.”3 Called “Madame Sophie” by the menagerie’s assistant inspector, Alois Kraus, the four-year-old primate was described as “an exceedingly unique animal.” During the journey to Schönbrunn, she had constantly hung around his neck.4 Th is was the fi rst time the menagerie had succeeded in bringing a live ape to Schönbrunn.5 The Viennese zoologist Leopold Fitzinger commented specifically on the primates, which also included a Celebes crested macaque and twenty smaller monkeys: “With perhaps even greater interest, the public turns to the apes.” Fitzinger noted that especially the orangutan “occasions all kinds of contemplation, so that people can make up their minds through personal observation and selfstudy about the tenets of Darwin’s theory of descent, which have penetrated the most varied strata of the population.”6 Given the vast literature on Darwin and evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century, it is remarkable that the role played by the zoological garden in the popular reception of Darwin’s ideas has received so litt le attention from scholars.7 For, as Fitzinger’s comment suggests, following the publication of 81

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Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, apes and monkeys were suddenly no longer just apes and monkeys. The thesis of this essay is that the perception of apes changed abruptly and fundamentally after about 1860, and that this change turned the zoo into a powerful medium of Darwinism.8 Th is development can be att ributed to four phenomena that arose almost simultaneously and that quickly began to reinforce and drive one another forward. What follows relates to the zoos of Vienna and Germany, though with certain modifications it applies also to France or Great Britain.9 First, Darwin’s theory of evolution provided a “story” that had explanatory power.10 In its most concise (and erroneous) form, the theory stated: “Man is descended from the apes.”11 It was this simplification that gave the “ape theory” its potency in the media, which was further heightened by the fact that it was so well suited to visual illustration. Second, broad new channels for disseminating this story began to emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century. The “media revolution” made possible by the spread of literacy and the invention of rotary-press printing in 1847—that is, the publication of illustrated magazines and newspapers, some with circulation numbers in the six figures—carried the debate to a mass audience. Th ird, the appearance of zoological gardens provided a new sphere of resonance. In the German-speaking countries, for example, the fi rst great wave of “bourgeois” zoos began precisely at the end of the 1850s.12 Fourth, zoos offered a concrete locus for apes, who were seen for the fi rst time in German zoos in the 1860s. To say that the zoo became a medium of Darwinism does not mean simply that it became a mouthpiece of Darwinism. Rather, I hope to elucidate here the degree to which the zoo, because of the specific way in which it functioned, not only amplified Darwinism but also reshaped and adapted it. This “zoo Darwinism” operated through the primacy placed on entertainment and humor, and it satisfied the public’s demand for frolicking macaques and melancholy orangutans. The zoo was thus by no means merely a passive recipient of a debate introduced from the outside. Instead, the apes and monkeys in the zoo exerted a reciprocal influence on the controversies among scientists and the public. Th is is especially evident in the supply of fresh ape cadavers, which anatomists and zoologists of the time were eager to obtain in order to carry out their comparative studies on the degree of kinship between humans and apes. Without the public demand for apes, scientists’ complaints about the scanty material for study would have been that much louder. Science and the public thus proved to be closely interwoven spheres, also and especially in the context of the zoo and the debate over Darwin’s theory of descent. 82

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Darwin in the Monkey Cage

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The Monkey House First, a closer look at the locus of all this activity: the monkey house, which was undoubtedly a magnet for visitors even before Darwin’s Origin. For example, in 1858 Die Gartenlaube, a hugely successful illustrated “family magazine,” noted the great popularity of the Berlin monkey house: “[E]ven the person who has seen the doings of these rascals a hundred times, who has resolved not to look at all, will . . . spontaneously cast a few glances at them, and will surely fi nd it hard to suppress a smile.”13 In a report from 1863, we read about the newly opened Prater Zoological Garden in Vienna, which, unlike the imperial menagerie, was located in the center of Vienna: “So far the greatest attention has been paid to the most beloved monkey house and its droll residents. But that is the case everywhere.”14 One example is the Schönbrunn Menagerie, of which Maximilian Sieder wrote in 1905, “this cage is surrounded all day long by a crowd of onlookers, who take the greatest delight in the leaps and antics of their cousins”; he even went so far as to claim that “a great many of the Viennese visit the menagerie only because of them, without paying attention to the other animals.” Time and again, the monkey house was described as “the main att raction” or as the “favorite place of the Viennese.”15 A lack of sources hardly allows us to reconstruct what the visitors “really” saw and thought. The numerous descriptions of the monkey house are secondhand and were transmitted by the media. That holds true also for the few pieces of evidence about a “direct” interaction between visitors and the caged animals. In July 1903, a visitor at Schönbrunn was handed over to the police for “throwing shards of a mirror into the monkey cage.”16 As late as 1926, it was said that the taunting of the apes was “an immortal sport in the monkey house.”17 A report from the Düsseldorf Zoo relates that “a chained toque macaque snatched the parasol from a lady and retired with it to his perch, where he remained for some time very quietly under the shade of the parasol, which created a very comical sight.” Evidently the monkeys in some zoos were still “attached”—that is, chained—“as in an animal exhibit of a traveling menagerie.”18 Which brings us to the question of what the monkey house actually looked like: in the Schönbrunn Menagerie, “a large, delicate jumping house for monkeys made of iron bars” was erected between 1845 and 1849.19 It contained “four high climbing trees,” “while the cupola is equipped with hanging hoops and climbing ropes”—all this “for the amusement of the public,” as Fitzinger wrote.20 Jumping houses of this kind were found in a great many zoos at 83 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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the time, for example, in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main.21 They offered the always-large audience a sizable viewing area, the purpose, as we read time and again in the sources, being to satisfy their “curiosity” (Schaulust).22 However, zoo directors, zoo architects, and zoologists in the second half of the nineteenth century often voiced their criticism of the design of monkey houses. They asked themselves how the enormously high mortality among the animals could be reduced. They demanded more space, light, and fresh air, demands that reflect the discourse over hygiene at the time. In the Schönbrunn Menagerie, this led to a new building that was opened to the public in September 1907. The outside cage was now substantially smaller. To protect the monkeys from being infected by visitors with lung diseases, glass walls were inserted in the interior cages. A heating system was also installed.23

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The Apes Arrive The chimpanzee brought to the Netherlands around 1640 was probably the fi rst anthropoid ape to reach Europe alive.24 It was only in 1776, more than 130 years later, that the fi rst living orangutan was transported from Borneo to Europe, where he died soon after, in January 1777, in the menagerie of the Dutch Stadholder in The Hague.25 In the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, chimpanzees or orangutans were seen only rarely in zoological gardens, for example in London or Paris, and the gorilla was unknown in Europe until 1847. Moreover, traveling menageries were often better stocked than zoos. While the Schönbrunn Menagerie was able to present its fi rst anthropoid ape only in 1878 with Madame Sophie, the traveling Menagerie Stieglitz exhibited the orangutan female “Miss Bessy” much earlier, from 15 October to 31 December 1856.26 The anthropoid apes brought to Europe were almost exclusively young animals, as adult animals were usually killed during capture.27 And because these young animals rarely survived more than a year in captivity (most only a few months), visitors to zoos seldom saw an adult anthropoid ape. The fi rst fully grown orangutans came to Europe only at the end of 1893, but these lived barely more than two months.28 Mortality was so high that animal traders like Carl Hagenbeck broke their prices down into different levels: a base price and a kind of supplement for every month that an orangutan, for example, survived.29 In other words, given the relative rarity and very brief life span of anthropoid apes, few zoo visitors ever saw them, with macaques and other smaller monkey species being more usual in the zoo. Because of anatomical peculiarities, young orangutans look much more 84 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

Darwin in the Monkey Cage

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humanlike than do older animals. Especially the head undergoes considerable change: the so-called sagittal comb grows on top of the skull, the lower jaw pushes forward, and the canines become longer. During the course of his life, the orangutan also grows cheek pouches and a pronounced throat pouch.30 But the fact that it was almost exclusively young—that is, very humanlike—orangutans who could be seen in zoos and menageries greatly facilitated the “Darwinist perception.” For zoologists, however, the lack of adult animals posed a serious problem for their studies, something I address later in the essay. Within the German-speaking sphere, the zoo in Cologne was the fi rst to call an orangutan its own in 1863. The young animal “became the greatest att raction of the garden alongside the giraffes. However, it lived only half a year.”31 The fi rst gorilla to live in a zoo anywhere in the world was M’pungu in 1876 in the Berlin “Aquarium.” His presence caused such a sensation that he even went on a tour to England.32 Mafuka was on exhibit at the Dresden Zoo from as early as 1873, though there was uncertainty over whether this was a gorilla, a chimpanzee, a mixture of the two, or possibly a separate species of anthropoid ape.33 The animal painter and journalist Heinrich Leutemann revealed the kind of associations Mafuka triggered: “Ape, gorilla, orangutan, chimpanzee! Who, at the sight of these, does not think immediately of Darwin, Vogt, and similar greats, who are trying to make ever more clear to us what they believe to be our more

The First Living Gorilla in Europe, by Gustav Mützel. (From Illustrirte Zeitung 67 [1876], 94)

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The Chimpanzee Mafuka in the Zoological Garden of Dresden by Heinrich Leutemann. (From Über Land

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und Meer 35 [1876], 92)

likely relationship to these four-handed animals?” Leutemann made the new perspective on anthropoid apes explicit: “Let everyone make up their own mind about these more recent studies, this much is certain: the great anthropoid apes, whom, under the most disquieting presumed descent, we would have to regard as our closest relatives, are for that reason now attracting our interest much more so than before.”34 And, as the German naturalist Otto Zacharias observed: “Even the uneducated is familiar with the name Darwin and in his semi-ignorance knows at least this much, that the bearer of this name is the author of the monkey theory.”35

The “Monkey Theory” The Origin of Species has nothing to say about humans and apes; Darwin was content with the cryptic remark, “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”36 That illumination came from other sources, including Thomas Huxley, who in 1863 published his book Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, and Ernst Haeckel, who championed Darwin’s theories in his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Natural History of Creation), published in 1868. Huxley and Haeckel did not hesitate to apply the theory of evolution to humans and to postulate common ancestors with anthropoid apes.37 86

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Darwin in the Monkey Cage

The monkey, and especially the anthropoid ape, was a subject of the controversy in two ways: as an epistemological object and as a point of reference in the media. First, a brief sketch about the former: the heated controversy between Thomas Huxley and Richard Owen from 1860 to 1862 is considered the prelude to the Darwinism debate. Huxley argued that the lower monkeys were anatomically much more distant from anthropoid apes than the latter were from humans, and thus tried to move the latter two close to each other. Owen rejected this methodology as misleading. What mattered was the comparison of “adjoining” species, that is, between anthropoid apes and humans. In this comparison, Owen created for humans a specific subclass. He derived this special status from the brain, especially the presence of the hippocampus minor in humans. Owen’s critics, chief among them Huxley, countered that this part of the brain was also developed in apes.38 The following decades of anatomical research were characterized by comparative studies that sought to defi ne the differences between humans and apes. I will return to this question later in the essay. The ape, however, was also the focus of the Darwinism debate conducted in the media. Huxley and Haeckel—as well as their critics—went beyond the scholarly community and addressed a broad public in speeches, newspaper articles, and popular writings. They did this simultaneously, though, and not successively: the controversy did not spill over from science into the public arena; it was—especially in its focus on the question of descent—carried on in public forums from the very beginning. It was not until 1871 that Darwin himself published The Descent of Man.

Zoos and Darwinism in Vienna All this left imprints on Vienna—imprints, not least, of an iconographic kind. Darwin was the only scientist who was honored during his lifetime with a relief of his head on the façade of the new Museum of Natural History. A good deal more playful teasing goes on inside the museum. One scene in the frieze that ornaments the great cupola shows a monkey holding a mirror up to a boy. The latter does not wish to acknowledge his animal descent and covers his eyes, while a second monkey holds out Darwin’s The Descent of Man as proof.39 The dominance of the “monkey theory” in the media was also substantially reinforced by the fact that it was so well suited to visual depiction. Th is visualizability was also crucially responsible for the fact that the public Darwinism debate so often resorted to humor and satire.40 When Darwin died in April 1882, the Viennese satirical magazine Kikeriki published a 87

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cartoon showing a jungle scene in which a monkey is holding up an obituary. The caption reads: “The monkeys, too, must be very sad about Darwin’s death.”41 As in other countries, the Darwinism debate began in Austria as early as 1860. The zoologist Gustav Jäger delivered the fi rst two lectures in Vienna about the theory of evolution on 10 and 15 December at the Association for the Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge (Verein zur Verbreitung naturwissenschaft licher Kenntnisse).42 In 1863, Jäger founded the fi rst zoological garden at the Prater and published several works of natural history that reached a broad audience. Th is combination of Darwinist and zoo director is also found in the Viennese zoologists Carl Bernhard Brühl and Friedrich Knauer.43 Brühl was a professor of zootomy at Vienna University and one of the champions of the Viennese adult education movement. For decades, he gave public lectures that were addressed to an interested audience outside the university, and in which he also discussed the “Darwinian theory” repeatedly between 1872 and 1890.44 Knauer was one of the fi rst full-time science popularizers and founded another zoo in the Vienna Prater in 1893. The title illustration of his magazine Der Naturhistoriker—beneath a bust of Darwin lie a human and a simian skull along with Darwin’s Descent—identifies him as a proponent of the idea of evolution. The question that arises in our context is whether Jäger, Brühl, and Knauer tried to use the Prater Zoo of the 1860s and 1890s to propagate their Darwinist convictions. To anticipate the answer: there is no evidence they did. Since Jäger’s years as director of the Prater Zoo (1863-66) were characterized above all by fi nancial woes, his organizing any kind of program for the zoo would seem unlikely. Brühl ran the Prater Zoo for only a few months in the summer of 1866. He gave public lectures there, though unfortunately we know nothing about their content. Friedrich Knauer described his collection of anthropoid apes as one of the “main att ractions,” whose cages were “besieged by visitors.” He kept “20 orangs and chimpanzees in the Vienna Vivarium between 1888 and 1896.”45 Knauer saw his anthropoid apes primarily as a way to att ract the desperately needed crowds of visitors, less so as a way to propagate the theory of evolution. Most zoo directors probably thought along similar lines. One exception was Alfred Brehm, author of the famous book Thierleben (Life of Animals). Around 1870, he gave what amounted to impromptu lectures in front of the monkey cages in his Berlin zoo, the so-called Aquarium, where he compared lion marmosets and chimpanzees. He was thus following the arguments of Huxley and Haeckel, who maintained that the differ88

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Darwin in the Monkey Cage

ences between anthropoid apes and lower monkeys were greater than those between the former and humans. “At times I put this thought into words to unbiased visitors to the Aquarium, looking at both monkeys, and I never encountered opposition from these people: that is how convincing the comparison between both monkeys was. Those who wish to be blind I do not seek to convert,” Brehm assured the readers of Die Gartenlaube and recounted the following episode: “‘I did not expect,’ said a gentleman last summer with furious mockery, ‘that I would be able to hear here in the Aquarium, for so small an entrance fee, a philosophical lecture about our descent from or our kinship with this lovely creature, the chimpanzee; for I did not know that Darwinism and materialism proselytize even here.’”46

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Laughing About the Ape—and Those Observing It It is well known that the intensity and social “reach” of the Darwinism debate was grounded in the fact that it carried a heavy ideological charge. The most vehement opponents of Darwin sought to stigmatize his theory of evolution as atheistic and materialistic. If man is nothing but an animal, they argued, manners and morals were threatened. In the heated climate of the Kulturkampf in the German Reich at the end of the 1870s, the Kreuzzeitung did not hesitate, for example, to blame the “monkey theory” for Max Hödel’s attempt to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm I.47 These strident tones did not suit the zoo, which was surely only in exceptional cases a place where sides were taken directly and explicitly for or against Darwin’s doctrine. Even the ardent Darwinist Gustav Jäger drew a sharp distinction here: “No matter how much contempt the zoologist has for humans, as a zoo director he returns contritely into the fold of the one true faith, which teaches that there is a world of difference between man and animals.”48 In the Schönbrunn Menagerie, until 1918 the private property of the kaiser, a Darwinist lecture like the one that took place in Brehm’s Aquarium would have been utterly unthinkable. Still, the zoo was a central space of resonance for the discourse over Darwinism. As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, the German popularizer of science Wilhelm Bölsche noted, with respect to “the Darwinian idea of development, the idea of the transformation and origin of species”: “By now there is probably no place where all these thoughts crowd in upon us in such concentrated fashion as in our beautiful zoological gardens.”49 The mere sight of anthropoid apes was enough to evoke associations with the theory of evolution. Most of the sources deal with the 89 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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question of descent, with occasional allusions to the “struggle for existence.” For example, the Viennese journalist and Zionist Theodor Herzl wrote in an 1897 essay: “Right at the entrance to the zoo at the Prater, one sees the horror and the comedy of the struggle of life strangely embodied in individual birds of prey and apes.”50 But were the visitors to zoos turned into ardent Darwinists by the mere sight of apes? Hardly. It is not difficult to hear the irony in Fitzinger’s comments quoted earlier about the “tenets of Darwin’s theory of descent, which have penetrated the most varied strata of the population.”51 For commentators usually directed their gaze less at the apes than at the people in front of them, as, for example, in a humorous drawing by Palm that presumably dates from 1873.52 The visitors are observed observing the apes; and the Schönbrunn monkey house, including the jumping tower, is clearly visible. Arrayed in the semi-circle in front of the barrier—clearly distinguished by their clothes—are “the most varied strata of the population,” from the wealthy citizen in the foreground to the simple worker in the back. Especially the middle-class families in the foreground seem to be enjoying themselves tremendously and are commenting on the doings of the macaques. The parallels between humans and monkeys are subtly hinted at: family groupings are depicted on either side of the cage, with a boy clinging to the top of the barrier and mothers holding their children close to their bodies. Guided by the caption, “Darwinist observations in front of the monkey house in Schönbrunn,” viewers of the drawing are supposed to ask themselves whether the visitors of the menagerie are speculating about their own descent.53 Palm’s drawing makes clear that the public of the monkey house was in itself an image, representing for the most part ironically tinged assumptions about what the sight of (anthropoid) apes triggered in the “simple” visitor. Complementary to the pictures we fi nd numerous anecdotes, like the following about “a monkey house where the Viennese can stand for hours and where the son says to the father: ‘We are descended from that one.’ To which the father responds indignantly: ‘You, yes, but not I.’”54 Journalists and caricaturists in Vienna and elsewhere rarely missed an opportunity to joke about the meeting of humans and apes in the zoo. Supporters of Darwin could make litt le headway against this humorous discourse and were dumbfounded by it. Wrote an irate Brühl: “Today, few questions preoccupy not only lay circles but also exact science as urgently as that about the phyletic (that is, relating to the history of a species) connection between humans and monkeys. . . . Except that laypeople and speculative ‘anticipators’ (Vorleser) exploit for it the unquestioned anatomical similarity between 90

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Darwin in the Monkey Cage

“Darwinist observations in front of the monkey house in Schönbrunn,” by Palm, 1870s. (Archiv des Tiergarten Schönbrunn, Vienna, Austria)

the two for all kinds of unfounded paradoxes and bad jokes.”55 As early as 1864, Gustav Jäger, during a lecture in Vienna, was emphasizing that humans are not descended from any ape still alive today, but that both had a common ancestor.56 But no matter how often Darwin’s supporters pointed this out—the suggestive nature and visual power of the monkey argument were too potent. Now, the zoo was certainly not the only institution that shaped the perception of apes. Apart from the already mentioned traveling menageries, there 91

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was also a separate theatrical genre that exploited apes’ anthropoid quality to create humor.57 Beginning around 1820, the so-called “Monkey Comedy” was very popular in Vienna. Here, monkeys were dressed in human clothes and taught human behaviors like riding and smoking.58 “What is the ape to men? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment,” said Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.59 People in the zoo and in the “Monkey Comedy” laughed, though the laughter always had the added function of securing the imperiled line of separation, for the staging of apes as dumb humans with tails made it all the more clear that they were precisely not humans.60 The visitor or audience could laugh with relief and was at the same time reminded and admonished not to regress from what had been “achieved” in acquiring the status of being human. Thus one could read on a plaque in front of the Schönbrunn monkey house in 1926: “He who teases a defenseless, captive animal is himself a vicious ape.”61 Anthropoid apes att racted not only journalists and zoologists, but also writers and painters, whose texts, drawings, and sketches often appeared in popular magazines. Wilhelm Busch, for example, was a regular visitor at the Hanover zoo in 1878. The draftsman and writer was well acquainted with Darwin’s ideas and made numerous sketches of monkeys and monkey faces.62 These sketches formed the starting material for his pictorial story Fipps, der Affe (1877–79). Like so many other literary texts around 1900, Busch’s story of a monkey in the world of humans deals with the question of how far humans have moved from the state of nature and to what extent civilization has changed them.63 The most famous text of this genre is Franz Kafk a’s Bericht für eine Akademie (Report to an Academy). His efforts to catch a glimpse of anthropoid apes are documented for the time this piece was written. Kafk a presumably saw vaudeville shows featuring apes in Prague and announced in a letter from the summer of 1912 his intention to visit the Dresden Zoo, which was quite successful at the time at keeping anthropoid apes alive.64

The Life and Afterlife of the First Schönbrunn Orangutan Let us return to the year 1878, when, as mentioned above, the fi rst orangutan arrived at the Schönbrunn Menagerie. The public followed the fate of Madame Sophie very attentively. She seemed to be cold, for she always wanted to wrap herself in a warm blanket. In the middle of November, the young female was taken ill, and the press did not hold back with maudlin details: “He, or rather, she, aroused general sympathy through her compliant, truly touching behavior during her illness.”65 The diagnosis was “homesickness,” 92

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Darwin in the Monkey Cage

the sight of a snowstorm had supposedly put her in a melancholy mood and caused the fever.66 The high mortality of anthropoid apes in zoos so deeply concerned such men as Max Schmidt, director of the Zoological Gardens in Frankfurt am Main, and Friedrich Knauer, founder of the Prater Zoo, that they compiled statistics about the apes’ life spans.67 Th ree decades later, Carl Hagenbeck was still mentioning “homesickness” as the real cause of death for orangutans, who were considered melancholic. He did not believe that the problem was “external care,” but “psychological treatment.”68 Following the death of the fi rst Schönbrunn orangutan during the night of 3/4 December 1878—after eighteen days of illness—part two of the drama commenced. To some Viennese, the unfortunate animal was in fact worth more dead than alive, as the university journal Alma Mater noted derisively: “Even if the poor animal is still being kept alive by the doctors’ art, heated inheritance proceedings, as usually happens with wealthy people, have already set in, which can again serve as evidence for Darwin’s theory. A professor of anatomy and a professor of psychiatry are laying claim to the corpse of the orangutan, the former to study its musculature, the latter its brain. Well, these two claimants could easily come to an agreement; but there is yet a third, who is asserting much more legitimate claims. He is the director of the Imperial Zoological Museum.”69 The magazine was referring to Ferdinand von Hochstetter, an ardent Darwinist, incidentally, and partly responsible for the above-mentioned pictorial program of the Natural History Museum, which in 1878 was still under construction, and into which the Imperial Museum soon merged. Hofstetter was afraid that “those studies that would make the valuable hide unusable would not shed much new light. The dead orangutan has not yet been defi nitively awarded to one of the three parties.”70 But already on 5 December 1878, the deceased orangutan was autopsied by “Prosector of Anatomy Dr. Zuckerkandel [sic] in the presence of Professor Meynert”; the cause of death of the “strongly emaciated animal” was declared to be intestinal catarrh, the brain, weighing in at 365 grams, was taken by Meynert for examination. “The orangutan will be stuffed and given a place in the cabinet of natural specimens.”71 That did not happen, of course, as we are told in a second newspaper article: “The body of the animal had been destroyed by the disease that killed it. Thus only the skeleton has been preserved for the Court Cabinet.”72 There had thus not been a serious quarrel, after all; the object of desire was divided in Solomonic fashion. Already at the meeting of the Academy of Sciences on 6 March 1879, Carl Langer presented a forty-six-page study 93

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titled “The Musculature of the Extremities of the Orangutan as the Basis for a Comparative-Myological Study.”73 Meynert did not write a separate treatise on the fi rst Schönbrunn orangutan and mentioned the cadaver only in connection with a publication on brain anatomy more than eight years later.74

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The Zoo as a Supplier of Cadavers The eagerness to get hold of the mortal remains of the female orangutan from Vienna was not a bizarre exception. Anatomists had always had an intrinsic interest in the cadavers of certain animals, partly as a result of a dearth of human corpses. In that regard, menageries with their rare animals were especially att ractive. In the case of what was presumably the fi rst orangutan to reach Europe alive, who died in January 1777 in The Hague and was dissected by the Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper, there was already a skirmish in the press about what should be done with the cadaver.75 In the nineteenth century, the Jardin des Plantes in Paris—or, rather, the Museum of Natural History in charge of it—witnessed repeated “distribution batt les” over who could lay claim to the animal cadavers that were to be studied and stuffed. At times the demand was so intense that a special commission was set up around 1840–41.76 The beginning of the Darwinism debate further boosted the demand for monkeys, especially anthropoid apes. Although many anatomical collections had skulls, skeletons, or individual parts preserved in alcohol, animal dealers, zoological gardens, and traveling menageries were able to deliver entire specimens and especially anthropoid monkeys “very fresh.”77 After “Miss Bessy,” the fi rst orangutan in Vienna, died (presumably at the beginning of 1857), she was dissected by Fitzinger, who worked at the Court Cabinet of Natural Specimens until 1869.78 The skeleton of the female chimpanzee Mafuka ended up in the Royal Zoological Museum of Dresden.79 A similar fate awaited the gorilla M’pungu after his death in November 1877. No less a person than the pathologist and anthropologist Rudolf Virchow, one of the most famous scientists of his day, dissected the rare anthropoid ape with his Berlin colleague Robert Hartmann.80 And the second gorilla of the Aquarium was also in the custody of the Berlin anatomists only a few hours after his death in March 1884.81 Emil Zuckerkandl published several essays on the brains of monkeys.82 As late as 1901, the Viennese anatomist decried the problem posed by the individual variability of the inadequately small sample: “The lack of adequate material is the reason why, in spite of a considerable expenditure of effort and 94 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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Darwin in the Monkey Cage

perspicacity, we are still in the dark about important points of the monkey brain.”83 The cadavers of anthropoid apes were so sought-after that they were even imported. For example, in 1907 the heads of the two anatomical institutes at the University of Vienna, Zuckerkandl and Carl Toldt, requested funds from the governor of Lower Austria to procure a gorilla cadaver, which was far rarer than a cadaver of a chimp or orangutan: “The Animal Dealer J. F. G. Umlauff in Hamburg has offered the anatomical institutes the wellpreserved (frozen) cadaver of a young gorilla for sale at the price of 800 Marks. Since this anthropoid ape is an extraordinarily important object for anatomical studies, this request has been granted.”84 As I have said, the epistemological object of the Darwinism debate was the (anthropoid) ape, and in a very concrete way. Darwinists as well as skeptics and opponents of the theory of evolution were eager for material to substantiate their theses. The spectrum of possible positions was broad. Langer avoided taking sides explicitly during his study of the Schönbrunn orangutan and sought to chart a noncommittal middle path: “A comparison of the terminal member of the lower extremity of the orangutan with that of humans showed both similarities as well as differences.”85 For Meynert, meanwhile, the dissection of the brain of the same animals fit into his fi ndings on Darwin’s theory. Of course, taking a critical stance toward Darwin was by no means tantamount to arguing against evolution. That is true of both Meynert and Theodor Wilhelm Ludwig Bischoff. The Munich anatomist and anthropologist Bischoff pursued a decidedly anti-Darwinian agenda in his numerous comparative-morphological essays.86 In the process, he did not argue against the principle of evolution, but he was vehemently opposed to Huxley’s claim that the anthropoid apes were, in terms of evolutionary history, closer to man than to the lower monkeys. Th is was, as I have mentioned, the real frontline of the morphological debate since the controversy between Huxley and Owen at the beginning of the 1860s. Virchow, for example, did not believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution was backed by sufficient evidence.87 The conditions of the zoological gardens—which also included the, from a modern perspective, completely inadequate living conditions of the monkeys and apes—and of their “material” had a direct impact on the production of knowledge. The fact that the anthropoid apes survived for only brief periods meant for the anatomists that they often had only the cadavers “of younger animals at their disposal.”88 The fact that the animals were not yet fully grown—that is, sexually mature—limited the kind of study that was possible and placed a question mark next to the anatomical fi ndings. For ex95

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ample, Brühl wondered whether all orangutans in fact grow a sagittal comb, and whether the five orangutan skulls without a comb that he was able to examine in 1852 came from young or adult animals.89 Still, access to the resources of the zoo provided an advantage that is hard to overstate. Th anks to his close ties to the Zoological Society, which operated London’s Regent’s Park Zoo, Richard Owen had access to anthropoid apes, which gave him what amounted to an interpretive monopoly until the controversy with Huxley. For example, he was able to dissect and describe the three anthropoid apes that came to the Regent’s Park Zoo in the 1830s and died soon after their arrival: an orangutan (1830), a chimpanzee (1835), and a gibbon (1839).90 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Emil Zuckerkandl had no fewer than thirteen brains of orangutans and seven of chimpanzees. The provenance of these brains cannot be determined, though it is likely that they included not only that of “Madame Sophie,” but also the cerebral remains of Knauer’s rich collection of anthropoid apes from the Prater Zoo.91 Without the strong public demand for anthropoid apes, combined with their short life span in captivity, the availability of fresh cadavers of these expensive animals would surely have been much reduced. And so it was precisely the scientists like Brühl who decried the broader public’s supposed incorrigibility and joking, who, at the same time, profited from what they characterized as superficial interest.

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The Zoo as a Medium of Darwinism In view of the thesis set forth at the beginning of this essay, I return once more to the question of what kind of place the zoo was within the context of Darwinism.92 It is certainly true that the humanoid quality of monkeys and apes had haunted Homo sapiens long before Darwin’s Origin. As Harriet Ritvo has pointed out, “Naturalists, after all, had always recognized an analogy between the human and the animal spheres.”93 In the early modern period, many reports circulated about troglodytes, pygmies, and other creatures thought to be intermediate between animals and man. The Enlightenment sought to create order in this regard. Carl von Linné had recognized the anatomical similarities between humans and chimpanzees, and in 1758, in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, he created the order of the primates (literally, “animals of the fi rst rank”). But the Swedish naturalist preserved a respectful distance in that he divided the primates into different families. Eighteenth-century anthropology thus certainly toiled over the question of the kinship between humans and anthropoid apes. But only Rousseau dared 96 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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Darwin in the Monkey Cage

to articulate this possibility openly; his many critics vehemently rejected a descent from the apes.94 In the nineteenth century, however, the question about the kinship with anthropoid apes was no longer discussed—as it had been in the eighteenth century—within a comparatively small circle, especially in the wake of the publication of Darwin’s Origin.95 To quote Die Gartenlaube once more: “Ever since the natural scientists have moved Mr. and Mrs. Ape so disconcertingly close to us, they undoubtedly have the right to be paid more attention by humans than has been the case so far.”96 The chronological coincidence of Darwin’s theory of evolution with the wave of newly founded zoos patronized by the middle class in the Germanspeaking countries and with the arrival of the fi rst anthropoid apes in these zoos around 1860 soon gave rise to its own dynamic, with the “monkey theory” having a particularly loud resonance in the zoo. Newspaper articles about the arrival of anthropoid apes in zoos in the 1870s repeatedly speak of tens of thousands of visitors who showed up immediately thereafter to see a gorilla, as in the Berlin Aquarium in 1876, or an orangutan, as in the Schönbrunn Menagerie in October 1878. Zoological gardens were thus responding increasingly to a public demand—after all, as an institution they were usually dependent on the number of visitors and the revenues they generated. For example, the director of the Zoological Gardens in Frankfurt, Max Schmidt, wrote this about anthropoid apes in 1878: “The lively interest which they invariably arouse has given cause, during the last decade, to paying special attention to acquiring them for the European zoos.” Alwin Schöpf, the director of the zoo in Dresden, was even more blunt: “The better part of the revenues from visitors here we owe to Mafoka [sic].”97 The zoo allowed visitors to witness the monkeys’ antics fi rsthand and to marvel at the humanlike quality of the anthropoid apes. However, we know very litt le about this immediate experience by the “average” visitor because of a lack of sources. It seems much more fruitful to give up the notion of “the visitor.” The spectrum of individuals who spoke up within the context of zoo and Darwinism was highly heterogeneous. It ranged from zoo directors to zoologists and popularizers of science, journalists and cartoonists, writers and artists, to human anatomists and zoologists working on comparative morphology. Their perceptions of the monkeys and apes and their motives for engaging with them were correspondingly diverse. To do conceptual justice to the diversity of approaches and the ways of understanding involved, I refer to the zoo as a medium of Darwinism. Above all, the term medium is intended to make clear that we are talking about a 97

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two-way relationship. Although the representation of monkeys—and especially of anthropoid apes—in zoos by no means merely reflected the debate that was being carried on with equal intensity in professional circles and by the public, it did exert an influence on that very debate. The relationship, then, was dynamic and reciprocal. For example, the generation of knowledge in comparative anatomy was determined in part by the quantity and ages of the available anthropoid apes. The concept of the medium also implies that what was fed into it was changed in accordance to the logic of the medium—that is to say, the Darwinian content was adapted and adjusted to its own manner of functioning. Th is logic of the medium of the zoo includes, with regard to the visitor, the primacy of entertainment, reflected in the corresponding reductionism and exaggeration, as well as in the always-ambivalent anthropomorphization that vacillated between drawing parallels and lines of separation between humans and apes. The way in which the whole problem was boiled down to the “monkey question” was further accentuated by the specificity of the medium of the zoo. Th is included the simplification—if not to say, falsification—of the Darwinian theory of evolution, that is, the statement that monkeys are our ancestors, not our relatives. For scientific knowledge to become known to the public and socially relevant, it must allow itself to be translated into cultural narratives. The “monkey theory” did just that in exemplary fashion for Darwinism. As has become clear in the course of my reflections, the medium zoo “acted” in conjunction with the “conventional” media. The important point, therefore, is to emphasize not only the parallel, but above all the concerted action of these media. In this essay, I have focused chiefly on newspapers and magazines, though travel accounts, popular science books, and encyclopedias were surely part of this landscape. “Mass media” that truly deserves this label existed from about 1850 on, thanks to the growing literacy and the introduction of the rotary printing press. To mention only two examples: Die Gartenlaube, which I have quoted several times, was the German illustrated magazine with the largest circulation in the nineteenth century, and was fi rst published in 1853; Vienna had more daily papers in the second half of the nineteenth century than it does today. It was only the newspaper articles about the arrival of the anthropoid apes that att racted the crowds. The reading of all these media shaped the expectations and perceptions of the visitors to the monkey house before they got there. Conversely, drawings made in the zoo became templates for the many animal illustrations in Die Gartenlaube, 98

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Darwin in the Monkey Cage

in Über Land und Meer, as well as in Brehm’s Thierleben or Busch’s Fipps der Affe, not to mention the many literary appropriations. In return, the expectations that zoo visitors placed on the print media grew accordingly. The reader “is no longer satisfied with the grey shadow pictures,” noted a review of a color edition of Brehm’s Thierleben. He was very familiar with the appearance and coloration of animals from “visits to the zoological gardens—and consequently expects as much from an illustrated work.”98 The two media of zoos and journals/books thus reinforced each other. The Schönbrunn Menagerie and other zoos thus formed a medium that produced texts, images, and even cadavers. The monkey house served as a central point of reference for essays and satires, as popular and richly associative entertainment every day for tens of thousands of visitors; as visual aids and inspiration for artists and writers; and as the indispensable material foundation for the debates by zoologists and anatomists about Darwin’s theory of evolution. Beginning around 1860, the zoo suddenly represented a part of the (natural) history of humankind.

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Humans in the Enclosures It therefore comes as no surprise that when Ernst Haeckel around 1870 postulated the idea of a missing link between humans and monkeys, the zoo became a place to search for this “missing link”—even if only in the imaginary. For example, in 1884, Krao, a “hairy girl,” was exhibited in the Frankfurt Zoo and in the Dresden Zoo; she came from what is today Laos and suffered from hypertrichosis, that is, excessive hair growth.99 The Canadian impresario G. A. Farini had begun marketing the then-seven-year-old girl in London in 1883 as the “missing link” between apes and humans and thus as proof of Darwin’s theory of evolution. While science was just beginning its search for the connecting link, it had long been on display in zoos, the circus, and in freak shows. Between 1875 and 1930, the zoo was also the stage of ethnographic displays.100 In Vienna, this was the case especially at the end of the 1890s in the Prater Zoo, which had failed fi nancially under Knauer as a pure zoological garden. Humans staged as strange and exotic were exhibited alongside lions and monkeys. Th is was a racist narrative, which suggested—argumentatively underpinned by contemporary zoology and anthropology—that humans from Africa and Asia were closer to animals. Th is representation of the idea of evolution in the juxtaposition of man and animals was in a certain sense the apex, or, rather, the nadir, of “zoo Darwinism.” 99 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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Humans have long since disappeared from the enclosures again, while monkeys and especially anthropoid apes have remained a central att raction of the zoo. In Vienna, the “zoo-Darwinist” discourse has been fi rmly rooted since “Madame Sophie.” A 2003 poster from the Schönbrunn Zoo shows a gibbon mother with her baby, looking at the observer and calling out: “Look, litt le one, . . . relatives all!”

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Notes Research for this essay was supported by Project No. P 14716 of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). 1. Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt (hereafter IWE), 28 September 1878, 3; IWE, 3 October 1878, 3; Neues Wiener Tagblatt (hereafter NWT), 3 October 1878, 3. 2. Wiener Zeitung (hereafter WZ), 9 October 1878, 3; same article in NWT, 9 October 1878, 4, and IWE, 9 October 1878, 4. 3. Neue Freie Presse (hereafter NFP), 5 October 1878, Morgenblatt, 5; similarly NFP, 6 October 1878, Morgenblatt , 4. See also NWT, 11 October 1878, 2. 4. 75/4, Obersthofmeisteramt (hereafter OMeA) 1878, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv Wien (hereafter HHStA); Alois Kraus, “Nach den Sunda-Inseln,” Die Heimat 4 (1879): 814, 825. 5. On the history of monkeys in Schönbrunn, see Julius Brachetka, Schönbrunn und sein Tiergarten (Vienna, 1947), 83–87; and Lothar Ditt rich and Dagmar Schratter, “Dem Tiergarten Schönbrunn in die Gehege geschaut: Bemerkenswerte Säugetiere im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” in Von Kaiser bis Känguru: Neues zur Geschichte des ältesten Zoos der Welt, ed. Gerhard Heindl, Helmut Pechlaner, and Dagmar Schratter (Vienna, 2005), 75–135, 115–20. 6. NWT, 19 October 1878, 1–2. 7. Th is was already noted by Sofia Åkerberg, Knowledge and Pleasure at Regent’s Park: The Gardens of the Zoological Society of London During the Nineteenth Century (Umeå, 2001), 170, 206. Th is aspect is missing from the otherwise good study by Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwin in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill, 1981). 8. I will mention only in passing that in the second half of the nineteenth and still at the beginning of the twentieth century, Darwin’s was only one among several competing theories of evolution, which included, for example, Lamarckism and orthogenesis (Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 [Baltimore, 1992]). Generally, there was no room in the zoo or the mass media for these kinds of distinctions. Here, Darwin, the “theory of descent,” and the “monkey argument” were used synonymously. 9. On the history of the Schönbrunn Menagerie, see Mitchell G. Ash and Lothar Ditt rich, eds., Menagerie des Kaisers Zoo der Wiener: 250 Jahre Tiergarten Schön100 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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Darwin in the Monkey Cage brunn (Vienna, 2002); and Mitchell G. Ash, ed., Mensch, Tier und Zoo: Der Tiergarten Schönbrunn im internationalen Vergleich vom 18. Jahrhundert bis heute (Vienna 2008). 10. Annelore Rieke-Müller points out that anthropomorphic human-animal comparisons had been constitutive of the popular understanding of animals even before Darwin, but that his theory of evolution now provided a scientific explanation; see her essay “Das zahme Wildtier—Repräsentant seiner Art und besserer Mensch? Der Zoologische Garten als Lernort im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Tiere: Eine andere Anthropologie, ed. Hartmut Böhme et al., 117–31 (Cologne and Weimar, 2004), esp. 131. 11. Th is was how one of Darwin’s critics summarized the theory of evolution (see Edward B. Aveling, Die Darwin’sche Theorie [Stuttgart, 1887], 3). 12. For a history of the foundation of these zoos, see Annelore Rieke-Müller and Lothar Ditt rich, Der Löwe brüllt nebenan: Die Gründung Zoologischer Gärten im deutschsprachigen Raum 1833–1869 (Vienna, 1998). 13. Anonymous, “Ein Besuch im zoologischen Garten zu Berlin (Erster Artikel),” Die Gartenlaube (1858): 672–76, 674. Fift y years later, the fun factor remains just as high. For examples, see Carl Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen: Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen (Berlin, 1908), 432; and Gerhild Kaselow, Die Schaulust am exotischen Tier: Studien zur Darstellung des zoologischen Gartens in der Malerei des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Hildesheim, 1999), 120. 14. Konstitutionelle Vorstadt-Zeitung (hereafter KVZ), 31 May 1863. A very similar account of the monkeys in Frankfurt appears in Max Schmidt, “Unser Affenhaus und seine Bewohner,” Der Zoologische Garten (hereafter ZG) 5 (1864): 74–82, 109–15, esp. 74. 15. Maximilian Siedler, “Altes und Neues aus dem Schönbrunner Zoologischen Garten in Wien,” ZG 46 (1905): 260–72, 264; Maximilian Siedler, “Mitteilungen aus dem Schönbrunner Zoolog. Garten in Wien,” ZG 48 (1907): 161–64, 162. 16. Menagerie-Inspektion, 26 July 1903, Archiv des Tiergarten Schönbrunn (hereafter ATGS). 17. NWT, 11 July 1926, 11. 18. Philipp Leopold Martin, Naturstudien: Die botanischen, zoologischen und Akklimatisationsgärten, Menagerien, Aquarien und Terrarien in ihrer gegenwärtigen Entwickelung (Weimar, 1878), 23. 19. Leopold Joseph Fitzinger, Die kaiserliche Menagerie zu Schönbrunn: Eine populäre Schilderung sämtlicher Thiere derselben (Vienna, 1875), 102. 20. Leopold Joseph Fitzinger, Versuch einer Geschichte der Menagerien des österreichisch-kaiserlichen Hofes (Vienna, 1853), 54–55. 21. Anonymous, “Ein Besuch,” 674; Anonymous, “Der zoologische Garten (Frankfurt),” Die Gartenlaube (1875): 334–39, 335. 22. On the spectrum of meaning of this equivocal term, see Oliver Hochadel, “‘Ein Volksbildungsinstitut ersten Ranges’?: Wiener Tiergärten zwischen Beleh101 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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oli v er hoch a del rung und Unterhaltung (1860–1920),” Spurensuche: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Erwachsenenbildung und Wissenschaft spopularisierung 14 (2003): 4–23, 5–10. 23. Alois Kraus and Franz Steindachner, “Vorschläge zur Umgestaltung der Menagerie,” 75/16, OMeA 1880, HHStA; MI to OMeA, 28 June 1907, 75/14, OMeA 1907, HHStA; IWE, 16 September 1907, 4. 24. Carl Niekerk, “Man and Orangutan in Eighteenth-Century Th inking: Retracing the Early History of Dutch and German Anthropology,” Monatshefte für deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur 96 (2004): 477–502, esp. 484. 25. R. P. W. Visser, The Zoological Work of Petrus Camper (1722–1789) (Amsterdam, 1985). 26. Der Botschafter, 15 December 1864, 2. 27. Robert W. Mitchell, “Scientific and Popular Conceptions of the Psychology of Great Apes from the 1790s to the 1970s: Déjà Vu All over Again,” Primate Report 53 (1999): 3–118, esp. 10; Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore and London, 2002), 64. 28. Mario Perschke, “Der Orang-Utan ‘Jumbo’ 1895 im Zoo Berlin, und andere Backenwülster,” Bongo 30 (2000): 95–113, esp. 98. 29. Lothar Ditt rich and Annelore Rieke-Müller, Carl Hagenbeck (1844–1913): Tierhandel und Schaustellungen im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt a.M., 1998), 122. 30. Robert Hartmann, Die menschenähnlichen Affen (Berlin, 1876), 16, 44-45; Friedrich Knauer, “Berühmte Menschenaffen der letzten Jahrzehnte,” Das Wissen für Alle 7 (1907): 440–44, esp. 443; Ramona and Desmond Morris, Men and Apes (New York, 1966), 125–26. 31. Rieke-Müller and Ditt rich, Der Löwe, 207–8; see the illustration in Illustrirte Zeitung (hereafter LIZ) 42 (1864): 81. 32. Bruno Dürigen, “Der Gorilla im Berliner Aquarium,” Über Land und Meer 37 (1877): 214–15, esp. 215; for a detailed account, see Harro Strehlow, “Beiträge zur Menschenaffenhaltung im Berliner Aquarium unter den Linden,” pt. 1, “Der Gorilla (Gorilla g. gorilla) ‘M’Pungu,’” Bongo 9 (1985): 67–78. See also Alfred Edmund Brehm, Illustrirtes Thierleben: Allgemeine Kunde des Thierreichs, 3rd ed., vol. 1, ed. Eduard Pechuël-Loesche (Leipzig and Vienna, 1890), 71, 74-75; Hans Werner Ingensiep, “Kultur- und Zoogeschichte des Gorillas—Beobachtungen zur Humanisierung von Menschenaffen,” in Die Kulturgeschichte des Zoos, ed. Lothar Ditt rich, Dietrich von Engelhardt, and Annelore Rieke-Müller (Berlin, 2001), 151–70, 153–54. 33. See Hartmann, Die menschenähnlichen Affen, 30; and Knauer, “Berühmte Menschenaffen,” 441. The problem of distinguishing the different species persisted until the end of the nineteenth century (see Mitchell, “Scientific and Popular Conceptions,” 7). On the case of Mafuka, see Oliver Hochadel, “Unter Menschen: Die Schimpansin Mafuka im Dresdner Zoologischen Garten (1873–75),” in “Ich Tarzan”: Affenmenschen und Menschenaffen zwischen Science und Fiction, ed. Gesine Krüger, Ruth Mayer, and Marianne Sommer, 149–73 (Bielefeld, 2008). 34. Heinrich Leutemann, “Der Schimpanse Mafuca in Dresden,” Über Land 102 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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Darwin in the Monkey Cage und Meer 35 (1876): 95–96; see also Alwin Schöpf, “Bericht über den zoologischen Garten in Dresden,” ZG 15 (1874): 86–93, 87. 35. Otto Zacharias,”Darwin und die Geologie,” LIZ 62 (1874): 391. 36. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London, 1985), 458. 37. Ernst Haeckel, Ueber die Entstehung und den Stammbaum des Menschengeschlechtes: Zwei Vorträge (Berlin, 1868), 30. 38. Nicolaas A. Rupke, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist (New Haven, 1994), 259–86. 39. Christa Riedl-Dorn, Das Haus der Wunder: Zur Geschichte des Naturhistorischen Museums in Wien (Vienna, 1998), 187; Stefanie Kruspel, Das Naturhistorische Museum als Gesamtkunstwerk: Ein kunst- und kulturhistorischer Rundgang durch das Haus (Vienna, n.d.), 36. 40. Janet Browne, “Darwin in Caricature: A Study in the Popularisation and Dissemination of Evolution,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145.4 (2001): 496–509. See also Julia Voss, Darwins Bilder: Ansichten der Evolutionstheorie 1837 bis 1874 (Frankfurt a.M., 2007), 293–94. 41. Kikeriki, 27 April 1882, 2. 42. On Jäger’s engagement in Vienna, see Heinrich Weinreich, Duft stofftheorie: Gustav Jaeger (1832–1917): Vom Biologen zum “Seelenriecher” (Stuttgart, 1993), 27–64. See also Werner Michler, Darwinismus und Literatur: Naturwissenschaftliche und literarische Intelligenz in Österreich 1859–1914 (Vienna, 1999), 32–33. 43. For more detailed information and references for Brühl, Knauer, and Jäger, see Hochadel, “‘Ein Volksbildungsinstitut,’” 11–17. 44. See the announcements in WZ, 10 October 1872, 1283; KVZ, 14 October 1872, 2. 45. Knauer, “Berühmte Menschenaffen,” 441. 46. Alfred Edmund Brehm, “Löwenäffchen: Unsere entfernten Verwandten,” Die Gartenlaube (1872): 850–55, 855. 47. Kelly, The Descent, 60, 97. 48. Gustav Jäger, Skizzen aus dem Thiergarten (Leipzig, 1872), 241. 49. Wilhelm Bölsche, Aus Urtagen der Tierwelt: Studien im zoologischen Garten (Dresden, 1922), 13. 50. Theodor Herzl, Feuilletons, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1911), 1:153. 51. In that sense, Rieke-Müller, “Das zahme Wildtier,” 131, is a litt le hasty when she writes that the theory of evolution “seemed to confi rm itself in the eyes of visitors through the observation of animal life in the zoo,” and that its popularization was “surely the real success story of the zoo in the nineteenth century.” 52. In spite of intensive research, it has not been possible to assign this drawing, which exists in the ATGS as an undated clipping, to a specific magazine. 53. Kaselow, Schaulust, 120–35, devotes a whole chapter to the paintings and drawings of monkey houses. 103 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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oli v er hoch a del 54. Ludwig Hirschfeld, Das Buch von Wien (Munich, 1927), 203. 55. Carl Bernhard Brühl, “Myologisches über die Extremitäten des Schimpanse,” Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift (1871): 4–8, 4. 56. Gustav Jäger, “Zoologisches über das Menschengeschlecht,” Schriften des Vereins zur Verbreitung naturwissenschaftlicher Kenntnisse in Wien 4 (1863/64): 203–43, 236. Similarly later in Haeckel, Ueber die Entstehung, 61–62; this was also pointed out by scientists who were rather reserved toward Darwin’s theory, as, for example, Virchow’s student Robert Hartmann, Die menschenähnlichen Affen, 49. Explicit opponents of Darwin used this alleged claim as a point of att ack. See also Kelly, The Descent, 32. 57. For the sixteenth century, see, for example, Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke, U.K., 2000), 12–13. 58. Markus Feigl, Tierschaustellungen in Wien: Anlässlich 250 Jahre Tiergarten Schönbrunn (Vienna, 2002), 18–21. For illustrations of monkeys in dress uniform or riding on dogs, see, for example, Heinrich Leutemann, “Aus der gebildeten Affenwelt,” Die Gartenlaube (1871): 756–59, 756. 59. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York, 1961), 41–42. 60. Fudge, Perceiving Animals, 12–13; see also Feigl, Tierschaustellungen, 18; Brett Mizelle, “‘Man Cannot Behold It without Contemplating Himself ’: Monkeys, Apes and Human Identity in the Early American Republic,” Exploring Early American Culture: A Supplement Issue of Pennsylvania History 66 (1999): 144–73, 151. 61. NWT, 11 July 1926, 11. 62. Eberhard Rohse, “Hominisation als Humanisation? Die Figur des Affen als anthropologische Herausforderung in Werken der Literatur seit Darwin: Wilhelm Busch, Wilhelm Raabe, Franz Kafk a, Aldous Huxley,” in Studium Generale: Vorträge zum Thema Mensch und Tier (Hannover, 1989), 22–56, 30–31, reception of Darwin by Busch, 35–38. For the great influence of the fi rst adult orangutans on artists in France and Germany, see Perschke, “Der Orang-Utan”, 104–8. On the reception of Darwin in the fi ne arts, see, for example, the special issue of the e-journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide titled “The Darwin Effect,” htt p://19thc-artworldwide .org/spring_03; and Pamela Kort and Max Hollein, eds., Darwin, Kunst und die Suche nach die Ursprüngen (Frankfurt a.M., 2009). 63. For a general overview of the monkey in literature, see Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, Der Mensch als Affe in der deutschen, französischen, russischen, englischen und amerikanischen Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Hürtgenwald, 1989); Rohse, “Hominisation,” specifically on Austrian literature, see Michler, Darwinismus. 64. Hartmut Binder, “Rotpeters Ahnen: “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,” in Kafk a: Der Schaffensprozeß, ed. Hartmut Binder (Frankfurt a.M., 1983), 271–305, 293–300. 65. Friedrich Albert Bacciocco, “Neue Gäste im Schönbrunner Th iergarten,” Die Heimat 4 (1879): 185n. 104 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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Darwin in the Monkey Cage 66. KVZ 25 November 1878, 2; unknown paper, 27 November 1878, Zeitungsausschnitt sammlung Friedrich Schlögl (ZASFS), Fasz. Schönbrunn, Wiener Stadtund Landesbibliothek (WStLB). 67. Schmidt, “Unser Affenhaus,” 114–15; Knauer, “Berühmte Menschenaffen,” 441. 68. Hagenbeck, Von Tieren, 435. See also Alex Pagenstecher, “Ein Besuch in den zoologischen Gärten zu Köln und Frankfurt a.M., Fortsetzung,” ZG 15 (1874): 55–67, 60. 69. Alma Mater: Organ für Hochschulen 3.47 (1878): 356. 70. NWT, 6 December 1878, 3; unknown paper, 6 December 1878, ZASFS, Fasz. Schönbrunn, WStLB. 71. Die Presse, 5 December 1878, 1. 72. WZ, 13 December 1878, 3. 73. Carl Langer, “Die Musculatur der Extremitäten des Orang als Grundlage einer vergleichend-myologischen Untersuchung,” Sitzungsberichte der k. Akademie der Wissenschaften 79. III Abt. (1879). 74. Theodor Meynert, “Die anthropologische Bedeutung der frontalen Gehirnentwicklung nebst Untersuchungen über den Windungstypus des Hinterhauptlappens der Säugethiere und pathologischen Wägungsresultaten der menschlichen Hirnlappen,” Jahrbücher für Psychiatrie 7 (1887): 1–48, 17. 75. Niekerk, “Man and Orangutan,” 491–92. 76. Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo: Von der Menagerie zum Tierpark (Berlin, 2000), 131. 77. Theodor Ludwig Wilhelm Bischoff, “Beiträge zur Anatomie des Hylobates leuciscus und zu einer vergleichenden Anatomie der Muskeln der Affen und des Menschen,” Abhandlungen der mathematisch-physikalischen Classe der kgl. bayerischen Akademie d. Wissenschaften 10.3 (1870): 177–297, 177. 78. NWT, 19 October 1878, 2. 79. Knauer, “Berühmte Menschenaffen,” 441. 80. Philipp Leopold Martin, “Der Gorilla,” Der Naturhistoriker, 1 December 1880, 25–26, 26. 81. Wilhelm Heinrich Gott fried von Waldeyer, Das Gorilla-Rückenmark (Berlin, 1889), 1. 82. For example, Emil Zuckerkandl, “Zur Morphologie der Affenspalte,” Centralblatt für Physiologie, 23 November 1901, 2–4; and Emil Zuckerkandl, Zur vergleichenden Anatomie des Hinterhauptlappens (Leipzig, 1904). 83. Zuckerkandl, “Zur Morphologie,” 2. 84. Z. 2046, 14.1/16.1.1907, Fasz. 809, Sign. 4 G, Unterricht—Allgemeine Reihe, Anatomisches Institut, AVA, Österreichisches Staatsarchiv. I am grateful to Tatjana Buklijas for providing this information. For another complaint about the shortage of primate material, see Theodor Ludwig Wilhelm Bischoff, “Vergleichend anatomische Untersuchungen über die äusseren weiblichen Geschlechts- und 105 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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oli v er hoch a del Begatt ungsorgane des Menschen und der Affen, insbesondere der Anthropoiden,” Abhandlungen der mathematisch-physikalischen Classe der kgl. bayerischen Akademie d. Wissenschaften 13.2 (1879): 207–74, 211. 85. Langer, “Die Musculatur,” 17. 86. On Bischoff ’s work on the anatomy of apes, see Christian Giese, Theodor Ludwig Wilhelm von Bischoff (1807–1882) Anatom und Physiologe (Gießen, 1990), 276–99. 87. Constantin Goschler, Rudolf Virchow: Mediziner—Anthropologe—Politiker (Cologne, 2002), 308–9. 88. Bischoff, “Vergleichend anatomische Untersuchungen,” 211. 89. Carl Bernhard Brühl, Zur Kenntniss des Orangkopfes und der Orangarten (Vienna, 1856), 3. 90. Rupke, Richard Owen, 260: “To Owen, the cloud of these deaths had a silver lining.” See, for example, Richard Owen, “On the Osteology of the Chimpanzee and Orang Outang,” Transactions of the Zoological Society 1 (1835): 343–80. 91. Zuckerkandl, Zur vergleichenden Anatomie, 15. 92. On the zoo as a medium in a more general sense, see Christina Wessely, “Künstliche Tiere etc.”: Zoologische Gärten und urbane Moderne in Wien und Berlin (Berlin, 2008); and Mitchell G. Ash, “Mensch, Tier und Zoo—zur Einführung,” in Mensch, Tier und Zoo, ed. Ash, 11–28. 93. The literature on this topic is vast; for the period before 1859, see, for example, Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge Mass., 1987), 30–55 (quote on 39–40). Overviews can be found in Hans Werner Ingensiep, “Mensch und Menschenaffe: Die besondere Beziehung,” in Tiere und Menschen: Geschichte und Aktualität eines prekären Verhältnisses, ed. Paul Münch, 429–46 (Paderborn, 1998); and in Morris and Morris, Men and Apes, 122–30. 94. Niekerk, “Man and Orangutan.” 95. “After Darwin, the relationship between humans and anthropoid apes changed profoundly” (Ingensiep, “Mensch und Menschenaffe,” 429). 96. Leutemann, “Aus der gebildeten Affenwelt,” 756. 97. Max Schmidt, “Beobachtungen am Orang Utan,” ZG 19 (1878): 193–97, 193; Schöpf, “Bericht,” 87; see Christoph Scherpner, Von Bürgern für Bürger: 125 Jahre Zoologischer Garten Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt a.M., 1983), 55; on the demand of the zoos, see Ditt rich and Schratter, “Dem Tiergarten Schönbrunn,” 116. 98. Westermann’s Illustrirte Deutsche Monatshefte 52 (1882): 679. 99. Scherpner, Von Bürgern, 59–60; Friedrich Knauer, Der Zoologische Garten: Entwicklungsgang, Anlage und Betrieb unserer Tiergärten und deren erziehliche, belehrende und wissenschaftliche Aufgaben (Leipzig, 1914), 90. The Dresden Zoological Garden profited “substantially” from exhibiting Krao, ZG 26 (1885): 344. On Krao in Britain, see Nadja Durbach, “The Missing Link and the Hairy Belle: Krao and the Victorian Discourses of Evolution, Imperialism, and Primitive Sexuality,” 106 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

Darwin in the Monkey Cage

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in Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, ed. Marlene Tromp, 134–53 (Columbus, 2008). 100. Among the many recent works on this topic, the following ones are especially well done: Werner Michael Schwarz, Anthropologische Spektakel: Zur Schaustellung “exotischer” Menschen, Wien 1870–1910 (Vienna, 2001); the chapter on Carl Hagenbeck as “ethno-entrepreneur,” in Rothfels, Savages and Beasts, 81–142; and the essay by Sierra A. Bruckner, “Spectacles of Human Nature: Commercial Ethnography between Leisure, Learning, and Schaulust,” in Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire, ed. H. Glenn Perry and Matt i Bunzl, 127–55 (Ann Arbor, 2003).

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Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk The Cultural Life of a Wild Animal in America

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k e l ly e n r igh t

On Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise, three animatronic men are forever chased up a palm tree by a rhinoceros whose sharp horn moves endlessly just out of reach of the lowest man’s bottom. Visitors to this ride float past harmless elephants who squirt water in the boat’s direction, playful gorillas ransacking a camp, and an intimidating herd of hippos who, despite the guide’s fearful warnings, do nothing but surface menacingly from the man-made lagoon. Since 1955, the Jungle Cruise has been an anomaly in the theme park. While other rides humanize animals, here they do not talk or sing. They resemble their wild selves in both physical form and behavior. The ride claims to represent actual geographic locations—the tropical forests of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Though there is a verbal identification of the continental shift, visually, the “jungle” itself is quite amorphous. Actors portray riverboat guides, adding spontaneity and human contact to the mostly robotic rides elsewhere. The jungle is too dangerous, it seems, to go it alone. Disney will send its visitors flying passively over the skies of Neverland, but an animatronic jungle is too much for a lone tourist. The interaction and “adventure” built into the narrative of this ride reveal a key to the mythology of the jungle itself. Tourism is essentially written into the experience of the jungle. Humans interact with wildlife in a seemingly “authentic” experience of a real but mythologized landscape with real but animatronic animals. The mechanized creatures in the Jungle Cruise represent animals in the 108

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Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk

wild, not cartoons. Still, there is something not quite wild about these animals, specifically the rhinoceros. Those are no ordinary men up the tree but poachers; this is no ordinary ride through the jungle but one endowed with moral meaning. The wild, it implies, will turn on evil. Thus in Disney’s sole attraction about wild animals for nearly fi ft y years (until the opening of Animal Kingdom, which offers a similar morality play), they are feared and violent, yet know right from wrong. They, like their anthropomorphized cousins, have a moral order.1 Having lived with the memory of this ride since childhood, I was struck when I came across a description of a similar scene in an 1838 news story on the Indian rhinoceros.2 The report quotes a local informant’s “authentic” account of the animal, which is represented as evidence of the rhino’s wildness. How did this story survive for close to 150 years and become part of Disney’s iconic representation of the experience of this animal, not to mention of the jungle itself? In American popular culture, rhinos are few and far between, endowing such cameo appearances with added importance. When it comes to animals in the latter part of the twentieth century, Disney is a rich source of cultural meanings. The Disney theme parks and fi lms mirror popular att itudes toward certain species. The Jungle Cruise reflects not only the myth of the rhinoceros’s wild violence but its continuing association with the image of an exotic natural landscape. From the earliest days of the rhino’s existence in the American imagination, this animal has embodied two elements—the wild and the mythic. Western theology of the early nineteenth century was characterized by a literalism that led biblical scholars to identify the rhinoceros with the reem, or unicorn: possessed of a single horn, solitary rather than social, strong, and randomly violent. Christian thought blended with science, folklore, ancient Roman texts, and Renaissance imagery to form an idea of the rhinoceros that exaggerated its savageness. Cultural perceptions of rhinos as aggressive influenced how these animals were treated in captivity and even determined for many years what was accepted as reliable scientific data about the species. These perceptions simultaneously reflected and reinforced the existing cultural construction of wildness as foreign and foreignness as wild. In the following analysis, I hope to show why Americans perceive the rhinoceros as quintessentially wild. I will argue that past cultural representations of the rhino have surrounded the biological animal with symbolism that expresses American att itudes toward its place of origin—the wilderness

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of tropical forests. The longevity of these representations demonstrates a national preference for myth over science, as well as a predilection for locating wildness far from home. Historians have examined the concept of wildness mainly as a problem of geography. Although wildness and wilderness imply two different meanings— the former about behavior, the latter about space—one cannot be understood without the other. Objects—in this case, animals—that are considered wild are located inside wilderness. Though they can be removed, exhibited, and displayed outside the space of wilderness, their perceived wildness rests in their association with this landscape. In his essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” the environmental historian William Cronon outlines a history of ideas about wilderness, which was a place of both terror and wonder in which lay the origins of American identity. Although Cronon focuses on the problem of separating humans from nature, which he sees as a central problem with modern environmentalism, he also separates wilderness from time. “[T]here is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness,” he writes; “[i]t is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny. Indeed, one of the most striking proofs of cultural invention of wilderness is its thoroughgoing erasure of the history from which it sprang.”3 The erasure of history is easier when the place of wild(er)ness is thousands of miles away. The concept of a jungle wilderness is a cultural construction reliant on its distance from American history and American experiences of nature. The mythos remains distinct from the reality. And so it is with the rhinoceros: In virtually all of its manifestations wilderness represents a fl ight from history. Seen as the original garden, it is a place outside of time, from which human beings had to be ejected before the fallen world of history could properly begin. Seen as the frontier, it is a savage world at the dawn of civilization, whose transformation represents the very beginning of the national historical epic. . . . Seen as the sacred sublime, it is the home of a God who transcends history by standing as the One who remains untouched and unchanged by time’s arrow.4

All of Cronon’s assertions about the construction of wilderness—that it is outside of time, savage, changeless—could be applied to the rhinoceros.5 The story of the rhinoceros reveals much about the construction of wildness in American culture. Th is story begins with the experience of the fi rst living rhinoceros to be brought to the United States. The ways in which this rhinoceros captured the imaginations of the general public left a legacy for all his cousins to follow. When the animal arrived in Boston Harbor aboard the 110

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Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk

Georgian in 1830, its owner, Marmaduke Burrough, immediately sold it for a profit to a showman. An American consular official in Calcutta and enterprising trader in exotic natural specimens from rocks to human skulls, Burrough had purchased the rhinoceros with the intention of selling it to a menagerie. The archives indicate litt le more than a profit motive in Burrough’s transaction, but he did go to quite a bit of trouble to complete it, negotiating the price, locating a ship willing to transport the cargo, and paying for the cage, provisions, and freight. Burrough’s brother wrote that year: “I hope you have made a good thing with your Rhinocerous.”6 The most common way for early-nineteenth-century Americans to experience exotic animals was in a menagerie. In the preceding century, showmen had toured the country with unusual creatures, displaying their appearance and behavior to a wide audience. Some of these creatures performed tricks, while others merely gazed back from behind bars; but all were meant to amuse.7 These displays presenting wild animals to the public became a form of popular education, as well. People went to menageries to see animals from foreign countries and, by extension, to learn and form opinions about those countries.8 In 1824, the Saturday Evening Post ran an advertisement for “A Grand Exhibition of Twenty-One Living Animals, much the largest and most valuable collection, ever exhibited in America.” Among the creatures on display were a lion “taken by the Arabs,” a “learned polar bear,” an “ouran outang, or wild Man of Africa,” Arabian camels, and several llama (or “South American camels”). The advertisement also describes the interactions between humans and animals that may occur at this exhibition. The lion “will suffer his keeper to kiss and handle him, and often manifests great fondness for him.” At the same time, the lion is “the best model of strength joined to agility. Its anger is noble, its courage is magnanimous.”9 Because the lion seems to display a liking for his human handler, his anger is described not as ferocious or savage but “noble.” Similarly, an elephant touted as “the largest and most sagacious animal in the world” as well as “one of the greatest natural curiosities ever offered to the public” was admired for his “sagacity and docility.” He enacted a balancing act and gave money to his handler with his trunk. These animals were not put in cages merely to be observed; they performed “amusing exercises” that demonstrated humans’ ability to interact with and control these wild creatures as well as the animals’ ability to interact with culture. The animals in the menagerie were anthropomorphized—given human characteristics, emotions, and tasks to accomplish.10 111

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The rhinoceros, on the other hand, represented a different kind of animal amusement. It did not accept projections of emotion or intelligence; it would not perform tricks (or, at least, not exciting ones); and it seemingly had no desire to participate in human culture. One writer, in fact, thought the rhinoceros should steal the moniker “king of the beasts” from the lion, as it “is certainly more dangerous, and . . . could kill him in a few moments.”11 Despite, or perhaps because of, its resistance to anthropomorphism, the rhino saw its fi fteen minutes of fame as the greatest of all natural curiosities, at least in the billing of the menagerie business. A September 1830 edition of the Saturday Evening Post advertised Marmaduke Burrough’s rhinoceros as “The greatest natural living curiosity ever exhibited in America . . . the Unicorn; or, one horned rhinoceros.” “His nose is armed with a formidable weapon,” read the ad, “even the Lion, Tiger, and Elephant avoid a contest with him.”12 Despite the colorful description of its behavior in the wild, the illustration accompanying the text shows him without animation, as a still, unexpressive specimen. Americans’ sense of the rhinoceros’s wildness derived not from reports of the animal’s behavior in its natural habitat but from a link in the Western imagination between the rhino and the biblical unicorn, or reem. Theologians had recently identified this creature, which is mentioned in Numbers, Deuteronomy, and elsewhere in Scripture, with the rhinoceros. Thus the reference in Burrough’s advertisement evoked not just secular mythology but also religious associations. I have, however, found no written accounts of the 1830 exhibition that explicitly link the rhino on display with a unicorn. Nineteenth-century travelers’ reports of encounters with rhinoceroses in the wild emphasize the animals’ savagery. Sir Andrew Smith, in an excerpt from his Illustrations of the Zoology of South Afr ica, gave this account in 1838 of the wild rhino’s behavior: Its disposition is extremely fierce, and it universally attacks man if it sees him. The usual method of escape adopted by the natives is to climb up a dense high tree, so as to avoid, if possible, being seen. If the animal misses his sight of the fugitive, he immediately gallops off to his haunt; from when it may be inferred that [h]e is not endowed with the power of a keen scent. Should he, however, espy his object in the tree, wo[e] to the unfortunate native: he begins to butt with his horn, strikes and penetrates the tree, and continues piercing it till it falls when [h]is victim seldom escapes being gored to death. . . . Having killed his victim, he leaves him without devouring the carcass.13

In this description, the rhino is not only violent but pointlessly so, apparently killing for mere pleasure. The rhinoceros is not a carnivore but, according to Smith, will attack humans without provocation. Moreover, this is not 112

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Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk

Broadside for the rhinoceros, or unicorn, 1835. (Circus World Museum, Baraboo, Wisconsin)

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survival of the fittest, where one animal dies so that another may live; it is a matter of chance, in which human death serves only to prove the animal’s ferocity. Th is narrative affi rms the popularity of such stories in natural-history texts. The rhinoceros’s behavior as represented in Smith’s text was a product of local mythology, not of scientific observation. These accounts of the rhino frequently refer to Pliny the Elder (ad 23–79) of ancient Rome, who was considered the fi rst natural philosopher by nineteenth-century Westerners and who describes the rhinoceros this way in his Naturalis Historia:

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In the same solemnities of Pompey, as many times else, was shewed a Rhinoceros, with one horne and no more, and the same in his snout or muzzle. Th is is a second enemie by nature to an Elephant. He fi leth that horne of his against hard stones, and maketh it sharpe against he should fight; and in his confl ict with the Elephant, he layeth principally at his bellie, which he knoweth to be more tender than the rest. He is full as long as he, his legges are much shorter, and of the boxe colour.14

Pliny’s description relies explicitly on observation of a captive rhinoceros, not a wild one. What’s more, the rhino is shown as a calculating enemy of the elephant, the animal that Pliny praised as “the greatest, and [the one that] commeth neerest in wit and capacitie, to men.”15 Thus by syllogistic logic the rhino is identified as humans’ adversary and located at the periphery of civilization.16 Although distant in time and space from nineteenth-century American observers of the captive rhinoceros, Pliny molded the opinions of the educated public in regard to exotic animals such as the rhinoceros. Writers in the popular press of the 1830s invoked this classical authority to reinforce notions of typical rhino behavior. For example, a report in Mechanics’ & Farmers’ Magazine of Useful Knowledge on the fi rst rhino brought to America described the species as a “great rarity . . . that was better known to the ancients, since we have accounts of him from Pliny, Dio Cassius, and others, from whom we learn that he was frequently exhibited in their circus and triumphal shows.”17 The anonymous author goes on to use Pliny to portray the alleged violence of rhinos, despite never having observed such behavior himself. The article does, however, claim that even though the rhinoceros on exhibit in Boston was “not of a ferocious nature,” it “is sometimes liable to paroxysms of rage.”18 Th is phrase regarding fits of ferocity is repeated again and again in descriptions of the rhinoceros, both general ones and those in natural-history publications. These fits are thought to be a natural trait even though they are seen only in the captive rhinoceros. As the author of the Mechanics’ & Farmers’ article puts it: 114

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Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk

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The animal now with us, appears to be of a stupid nature, and exhibits no traits of intelligence or instinct beyond those of the Hog, to which he seems to be allied in manners as well as form. He appears to distinguish no one around him, and to be insensible to every thing but the calls of appetite; eats constantly, whenever food is offered to him, and almost of any kinds. . . . It is singular, however, that his natural placidity of temper should be interrupted by a fit of passion, which he is subject to every day, with the greatest regularity, and sometimes twice a day. The fury attacks him, with more or less of violence, during which he is entirely ungovernable, runs about butt ing with his horn against any thing within his reach, and is only appeased by offering him some of his favorite sweet food.19

Like Pliny, this writer interprets the captive animal’s behavior as evidence of its habits in the wild. S/he blames neither the handler nor the condition of captivity itself for the fits but the rhino’s own nature. The behavior of caged animals, however, is culturally constructed not only by the preconceived notions of the audience but by its artificial environment and treatment by humans. Reports of the captive rhinoceros reveal more than its natural disposition; they convey culturally embedded ideas about its wildness as well as the rhino’s own ideas about being on display. At least one ambitious showman of this era attempted to train a rhinoceros for show. In 1855, Dan Rice purchased a rhino known as “Old Put” (after the Revolutionary War hero Israel Putnam) and taught it to sit, lie down, grunt, walk at varying speeds, and mount steps. The best he could do with the animal, other than the claim to have “exercised his will over ‘the most obdurate disposition of animal nature,’” was teach it to ring a fi re bell in a circus skit. The public was unimpressed, and the rhinoceros was “unanimously voted a humbug and a bore.”20 Old Put had killed a previous keeper, and his att itude toward his new handler showed no improvement. He gored Rice, sending him to the hospital for several days.21 Similar to Old Put, other rhinos on display were not passive actors in the construction of their wildness. As living beings, rhinoceroses exhibit individualistic behaviors and react to stimuli in their environments. Although some animals were acknowledged in the nineteenth century as possessing a degree of individuality, the rhinoceros was not among them. It is difficult for humans to observe rhinoceroses in the wild, as they wander dense jungles and swampy wetlands. Th is choice of habitat in and of itself has contributed to its mythic cultural construction. Each rhino reacts differently when confronted with humans, and its reactions are conditioned by multiple factors, such as gender, age, season of the year, and the presence of offspring. The rhino may charge, approach, or flee. The most prevalent account of the rhino is of the 1 15

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one who charges. But the sheer number of these reports does not necessarily reflect a reality. The rhino who walks away undetected may be as common as the one who chases a hunter up a tree. It is the latter tale, however, that is more exciting to tell, causing its popularity in the published literature. In captivity, a rhino will not behave as it did in the wild. Placed in completely artificial surroundings, an animal is but a relic of its wild self. The Boston rhinoceros’s “paroxysms of rage” suggest frustration with an alien and frightening environment. Though it may seem obvious that a caged animal acts differently from a free one in a recognizable landscape, this does not appear to be the understanding of those viewing this rhinoceros. The animal, removed from its natural environment, represented an “essence” of itself; its behavior was assumed to be a “natural” state of being. The caged rhinoceros provided a laboratory for the study not of nature but of the interaction between nature and culture. Th is critical point is one at which environmental history and cultural studies intersect. Studies of animals in history require examination of their perceived place in human culture at any given moment as well as a breakdown of these cultural lenses, attempting to understand the animal’s behavior as more than symbolic. Without anthropomorphizing, scholars need to give an element of agency to animals both in the wild and in captivity in the construction of their cultural images. Understanding animal behavior is integral to understanding what people saw and what they did not see when looking at animals.22

The Iconography of the “Ugly” Rhinoceros “[T]he Rhinoceros maintained its characteristic ugliness,” wrote one female visitor to a menagerie in 1834.23 Although she does not say where she got the idea that rhinos are ugly, the fact that she reiterated this view after her visit reveals one of the functions of the menagerie—to confi rm commonly held beliefs about the natural world. While Pliny’s writing guided nineteenthcentury notions of rhinoceros behavior, popular ideas about what rhinos actually looked like derived from the work of the sixteenth-century German artist Albrecht Dürer. Although Dürer had never actually seen a rhino, in 1515 he created the image that remained for several centuries the best-known representation of it in Europe. Dürer’s woodcut was based on descriptions and a sketch, sent to Nuremburg from Lisbon, of an Indian rhino presented as a gift to the king of Portugal, Manuel I.24 However unnatural Dürer’s illustration may appear to the modern eye, this picture provided the visual vocabulary used by subsequent 116

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Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk

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Albrecht Dürer, Rhinoceros, 1515. (Photo courtesy of the British Museum, London)

natural-history illustrators. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, exaggerated the animal’s features in his Histoire Naturelle (1764), where the rhinoceros retains the armored skin and cumbersomeness of Dürer’s depiction but assumes a new pose. Its horn is much more delicate than Dürer’s, however, and Buffon has added significant details to the landscape in which the animal is portrayed. Whereas Dürer simply sketched the rhinoceros on top of a patch of grass, Buffon drew it on the edge of a cliff, with a mountain in the far left and another cliff on the right. Buffon’s drawing appeared after what the historian Louise E. Robbins calls a “veritable ‘rhinomania’ of poems, coiff ures à la rhinoceros, engravings, and fancy clocks with rhinoceros bases,” which had been spurred by the exhibition of a rhino in France in 1749.25 The advertising for this French rhinoceros described it as exotic and naturally fierce but, unlike the later American one, “gentle as a dove.”26 It allegedly ran around its handler’s house like a pet dog. Although Buffon did not go to see this rhinoceros, he was undoubtedly aware of the cultural artifacts that depicted it; and it is likely that he based his engraving on a life-size painting of the French rhinoceros by another artist.27 117

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Another French naturalist, Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), painted the rhinoceros in a watery landscape with a marsh surrounding a lake. The rhinoceros is plated but not heavily, and its horn is realistically depicted. Most significant is the rhinoceros’s pose. Cuvier’s rhino is active, not standing like a frozen relic or stuffed corpse but moving freely. Its eyes are alert but not directed at the viewer. Carl Joseph Brodtmann’s illustrations in his Natural History of Mammals (1827) return the rhino to a simple patch of grass, giving it something natural to stand on that nevertheless conveys no real sense of its native home. Buffon’s cliff was more dramatic than the natural landscape, associating the rhino with the traditional imagery of the sublime. Although Cuvier’s illustration resembles the rhino’s native habitat, he used another landscape of sub-

Georges-Louis Marie Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, L’Rhinoceros, from Histoire Naturelle (ca. 1764). (Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

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Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk

limity—the amorphous space between land and water. One gets the sense when looking at Cuvier’s rhino that it is a living being with a life of its own; whereas Buffon’s is compelled to interact with culture through its gaze.28 In Brodtmann’s representation, however, the rhino is a scientific specimen, neither gazing back like a captive amusement nor wandering freely. He reverts back to the static pose of Dürer’s rhinoceros. Although the animal looks less cumbersome than Dürer’s, in both drawings the rhinoceros is looking down and inactive. It seems that Brodtmann, despite his having seen a specimen of the actual animal, could not forget the cultural images of the rhino. He was drawing from nature but thinking about Dürer. Thus images of the rhino in the 1820s did away with the idealized landscapes of Buffon and Cuvier, placing animals outside of the landscape as physical specimens removed from natural sett ings. Th is convention reveals the shift ing representation of animals in an increasingly scientific world as well as the ways in which the public was viewing these animals. Early-nineteenth-century menageries contributed to this changing perception, since all of their animals lived on mere piles of hay in cages with steel bars.29 Hence, visitors were unable to visualize the natural habitats of animals. They became scientific specimens that were significant for their physical form alone. If imagined in a landscape of the sublime, whether perched on a cliff or mired in a swamp, the rhinoceros was a representative of the exotic in the world and the wild in nature. By 1860, however, P. T. Barnum was advertising his menagerie with an illustration of a rhino that placed the viewer inside the animal’s cage. Th is perspective suggests a tame and perhaps even domesticated animal, as do the cartoonlike illustrations encircling the larger inset. In these vignettes, the rhino is shown being hosed down, looking at well-dressed ladies, lazing about, and being pulled in its cage by an elephant. The overall impression created by these images is that of a manageable creature, passive and unthreatening. Th is advertisement works on two levels. First, Barnum wishes to att ract a paying audience to his menagerie. Second, he plays on cultural perceptions of the rhinoceros to suggest that people will not only see what they expect but something more amusing. In Barnum’s menagerie, one should feel more than awe at the rhino’s rage or ugliness; one should see the rhino as a lumbering, lazy, odd creature of habit. Barnum’s attempt here at anthropomorphizing the rhinoceros transforms the wild animal into an object of amusement. He animates its behavior, forcing thoughts and feelings on the animal. Barnum’s illustration takes the rhinoceros completely out of the jungle. Even more fascinating, however, is how, by doing so, Barnum has also taken 119

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the jungle out of the rhinoceros. His rhino is an almost entirely cultural being, with no resemblance to its natural self other than physical form. It is not imagined as exotic or primitive; it is not meant to stand for the wild landscapes of Africa and Asia. It is simply an amusing sight—completely American, completely cultural. The preference for the exotic did not, however, sever the rhino from its natural habitat. Although Barnum’s amusement made the attempt, writers and artists extolled the exotic and the wild as sublime, restoring the rhino to its jungle home. While Barnum’s rhino interacted with urban Americans rather than jungle dwellers, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century museums, zoos, and fi lms visually restored the rhinoceros to its native landscape. As the public became more familiar with the form of the rhinoceros, they began to turn away from sources such as the Bible, Pliny, and Dürer, looking instead to these new sources of information. By the twentieth century, both science and entertainment sought to understand animals in relation to their natural habitat. American zoos increasingly replaced cages with “enclosures”—spaces that re-created an animal’s natural habitat and constructed for the viewer an imagined glimpse into the creature’s life in the wild.30 Displaying the rhinoceros in such a sett ing reflected a changing aesthetic of wildness. The rhinoceros appeared on the American scene in 1830 at a time when science and myth still coexisted peacefully. By 1860, tensions between entertainment and science pushed the rhinoceros out of the milieu of popular culture. Along with a growing body of scientific data that denied the rhino’s mythic origins, trainers’ inability to make the animal do anything that audiences found entertaining limited the place of the rhinoceros in American culture to zoological parks, not circuses. As the modern zoo emerged as a place of education, science, and recreation and the rhino’s novelty and mystery wore off, its failure as a performer led to a fall from its former billing as the greatest of natural curiosities. Similarly, the shift in zoos from cages to natural enclosures indicates an increasing public interest in the animal as more than itself, as part of a specific geography. Although for many this meant a more rational view of the world and the emergence of ecological thought, to others reacting to increasingly scientific constructions of nature, it had a different meaning. Nature writers, who clung to the idea of wildness as an integral part of American character and modern individuality, sought refuge in the concept of wildness. Interested in nature for its spiritual rather than empirical ends, these writers would regard the rhinoceros’s habitat (if not the rhinoceros itself) as a true source of wildness. 120

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Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk

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“Wild Fancies” Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) looked to nature as the savior of the world, and, though not an unscientific man, he did not intend to let scientific knowledge ruin his spiritual communion with it. In his 1862 essay “Walking,” Thoreau wrote: “The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans today.”31 Here Thoreau complicates the meaning of truth in nature by asserting that foreign perspectives are as valid as those of his fellow countrymen and intellectual peers. “The geologist has discovered,” Thoreau continues, “that the figures of serpents, griffi ns, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence ‘indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.’” Invoking mythological creatures, Thoreau turns science on its head, calling their discoveries not a new understanding of the prehistoric world but evidence of the mythological one. His idea of a “shadowy knowledge” is key here, for what Thoreau is suggesting is that this prehistoric world can never be known except through shadow.32 Thoreau backed up his claim that truth in nature is subjective when he argued: “The Hindus dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant.”33 He knows that his colleagues may dismiss this justification of Eastern mythology as “an unimportant coincidence,” yet Thoreau insists that it is still important to consider this point of view. In fact, he concludes: “I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the most sublime recreation of the intellect.”34 Thoreau, the famous advocate of wildness as the savior of the world, prefers abstract, mythological wildness to none at all. He mourns the world that science created in the first half of the nineteenth century, preferring foreign mythology to scientific explanation. For Thoreau, fossils re-create the mythic world of dragons and serpents, and support not biblical or paleontological texts but those of an exotic mythos. Thoreau wants wildness to remain “shadowy.” It is not scientific inquiry that raises the intellect but “wild fancies”; it is not fact that inspires but sublimity. His fear is that, by knowing nature scientifically, its wildness would be lost. Th is suggests that, to Thoreau, wildness has less to do with nature itself than with the narratives to which it is attached. 121 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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Thoreau’s location of validity in Hindu mythology is significant to the rhinoceros not only because both are Indian imports, but because both “transcend the order of time and development.” And it is these foreign roots that allow them to do so. Looking at a living rhinoceros in America is a “sublime recreation of the intellect” because it at once inspires thoughts of the ancient, the mythic, the exotic, and the wild. It is the epitome of the sublime. It is this same cultural preference for “wild fancies” that enables Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise, fi rst opened in 1955, to employ a nineteenth-century myth about the rhinoceros that continues to have meaning in the twenty-fi rst century. The rhinoceros is an example of a growing cultural preference for myth over science. Th is preference is reflected in specific ideas about the rhinoceros but is seen in more general arguments over wilderness throughout the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even among preservationists, arguments about animal representation abounded. There were those who told tales of animals by anthropomorphizing them, and those who adamantly opposed such “nature-fakery.”35 Thus even “wild fancies” confl icted and were often contested. Why the rhinoceros remains unanthropomorphized in American culture is a question that reveals a consensus on how the species is defi ned if not on the defi nition of wildness itself. The rhino’s wildness is complex and unstable; perceptions of the animal have relied on methods of exhibition and shift ing notions of the place of wilderness. Thoreau is lamenting the loss of his idea of nature through science, just as turn-of-the-century Americans mourned the loss of wilderness in the perceived closing of the frontier. Th roughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the rhinoceros stood for the uncontested wildness of exotic places. Wildness is something “out there,” something removed from civilization; the jungles of Asia and Africa where rhinoceros roam are as removed from American life as one can imagine.36 Because of its origins abroad, the rhinoceros retains an air of the mythic, mystic, and wild. The voiceless rhinoceros supports the American construction of wildness as a cultural rather than a scientific term. Like the rhino in the menagerie, whose behavior is a product of both its natural disposition and cultural conditioning, wildness itself has been defi ned in a negotiation of natural and cultural realities. The wild is unpredictable and sublime. It inspires respect and retains dignity. Neither measurable nor rational, wildness cannot be scientifically studied. It is a wholly cultural construction; and while nature plays a role in this construction, there is no such thing as innate or inborn wildness (though that is how it has often been historically understood). Scientists study animals’ behavior, not their wildness; if their behavior is seen as wild, that is 122

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Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk

cultural, not biological. It is therefore vital for those who study culture to analyze the relationship between humans and animals. Frieda Knobloch argues that historians must reevaluate scientific documents from their own perspective because scientists themselves “refuse to acknowledge their epistemological limitations and formally exclude points of view that draw attention to the made-up-ness of science.”37 She further argues that the archives (both historical and scientific) are products of a “fiction of colonial knowledge gathering and control.”38 Thus to retell the story of rhinos from their own perspective is difficult not only because they do not speak for themselves but also because the archive itself refuses them a voice. Knobloch’s assertion that historical science is a fiction draws further attention to the fact that certain places and animals are labeled “wild” for reasons beyond the natural. Ideas about animals reflect ideas about the places in which they live. Constructions of foreign landscapes are entangled in perceptions of other cultures as well as other natures. Wildness, then, is constructed out of the unseen or, as Thoreau would have it, “shadowy” truths about nature. Th rough the rhinoceros, Americans could construct wildness as a truly sublime, exotic Other. Equating the rhinoceros with the ultimate wild, savage beast, Americans temporally and spatially displaced real wildness. They made wildness an abstract ideology rather than a material reality. If Cronon’s idea of wilderness as a place can be transposed onto wildness in animals, it says something more about wildness as a product of the past and of the mythic. Thus the wildness of animals lies not only in their association with the geography of wilderness but with an imagined inheritance of wildness from mythical and prehistoric beasts. Just as culture ascribed ancient time to wildness, the jungle—as a realm outside Western notions of civilization—was made sublimely wild. The wilderness is populated by beings who will forever remain beyond the margins of civilization. Thus it becomes obvious why nineteenth-century scientists and writers put such faith in fi rsthand accounts of the wilderness and its creatures. They were seen as one and the same, existing in a timeless mythic arena. The Indian rhino is one of the few animals popularly known by its taxonomic nomenclature—Rhinoceros unicornis—while outside of a scientific context no one would ever refer to a polar bear as Ursus arctos or to a wolf as Canis lupus. The rhinoceros’s Linnaean classification reflects its mythic associations, but in the cultural imagination it is the scientific name that prevails. So what is it about this animal that wards off anthropomorphism and sentimentality? It is its fulfi llment of an American construction of wildness. 123

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Because the rhinoceros does not live in the wilds of America, it has been easier for creators of culture to construct its image without regard to its actual behavior. It is always necessarily removed from its habitat and put in cages, dioramas, or on fi lm. Removed spatially from the animal’s native range, producers of Western cultural images have used the rhinoceros as a symbol of the sublime in nature. Most Americans have never interacted with a rhinoceros; there are no folk narratives of the rhino.39 Representations of the rhinoceros, whether scientific or popular or even animatronic, are highly constructed images. If in today’s Animal Kingdom theme park uncaged rhinos can peacefully coexist with tourists, is it culture or nature that has changed? Perhaps a litt le of both.

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Notes 1. Stephen M. Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America (Boulder, Colo., 1992); Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). 2. New-York Mirror, 15 September 1838. 3. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1996), 79. 4. Ibid. 5. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, 1967); Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, 1991). 6. John Burrough to Marmaduke Burrough, 14 May 1831, shelfmark C0400, Box 1, Folder 10, Marmaduke Burrough Papers, Princeton University Library Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton, N.J. 7. Elizabeth Hanson, Animal Att ractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos (Princeton, 2002); Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore, 2002). 8. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). 9. Saturday Evening Post, 31 January 1824. 10. Ibid. 11. Appleton’s Journal: A Magazine of General Literature, 26 July 1873, 118. 12. Saturday Evening Post, September 1830. 13. Andrew Smith, Illustrations of the Zoology of South Afr ica (London, 1838), quoted here from an excerpt printed in the New York Mirror, 15 September 1838. 14. Pliny the Elder, The Historie of the World: Commonly called, The Natural Historie of C. Plinius Secundus, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1601), bk. 8, chap.

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Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk 20, quoted here from the digital edition at htt p://penelope.uchicago.edu/holland/ pliny8.html. 15. Ibid., bk. 8, chap. 1. 16. By contrast, elephants “understand the language of that country wherein they are bred, they do whatsoever they are commaunded, they remember what duties they be taught, and withall take a pleasure and delight both in love and also in glorie” (ibid.). 17. “Natural History: The One-Horned Rhinoceros of India,” Mechanics’ & Farmers’ Magazine of Useful Knowledge 1.2 (15 July 1830): 50. 18. Saturday Evening Post, 29 May 1830. 19. “Natural History: The One-Horned Rhinoceros of India.” 20. David Carlyon, Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You’ve Never Heard Of (New York, 2001), 227–28. 21. Ibid. 22. Examples of such scholarship include Richard White’s discussion of salmon in The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, 1995); and Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven, 2004). 23. Phoebe George Bradford, entry dated 12 May 1834, in Phoebe George Bradford Diaries, ed. W. Emerson Wilson (Wilmington, Del., 1975), 137, quoted here from the North American Women’s Letters and Diaries, www.alexanderstreet4.com/ cgi-bin/asp/nawld/getdoc.pl?/projects/artfla/databases/asp/nawld/fulltext/ IMAGE/.6074. 24. T. H. Clarke, The Rhinoceros from Dürer to Stubbs, 1515–1799 (London, 1986). 25. Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore, 2002), 93–97. See also Glynnis Ridley, Clara’s Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York, 2004). 26. Robbins, Elephant Slaves, 94. 27. Ibid., 95. 28. John Berger argues that through the gaze, human-animal interaction is dynamically changed. Speaking of animals in captivity, Berger remarks that when an animal looks directly at the human, it interrupts the foundation of the zoo experience. The zoo is, he writes, “a monument to the impossibility of such encounters” (“Why Look at Animals?” in About Looking [London: Writers and Readers, 1980], 22). The gaze of Cuvier’s rhinoceros may reflect a longing or an appreciation for a unique human-animal relationship, while Buffon’s rhinoceros implies an aesthetic of the wild as separate from intimate interaction with the human world. 29. Hanson, Animal Att ractions. 30. Rothfels, Savages and Beasts. 31. Major Essays of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Richard Dillman (New York, 2001), 180.

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32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Matt Cartmill, A View to Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). 36. Jennifer Price uses the term “Place Apart” to indicate the American perception of Nature as something outside the realm of culture (see Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America [New York, 1999]). 37. Frieda Knobloch, The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West (Chapel Hill, 1996), 154. 38. Ibid., 151. 39. While I take a leap here from nineteenth-century representations to midtwentieth-century ones, there is a literature on the rhinoceros throughout these decades. The travels of Theodore Roosevelt and others, fi lms by Martin and Osa Johnson, and new methods of exhibition in museums and zoos have contributed to the image we retain today. Though not discussed here, these sources are rooted in nineteenth-century imagery and contribute to the idea of the rhinoceros as sublimely and inexplicably wild. For more on this topic, see Kelly Enright, Rhinoceros (London, 2008).

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The Alligator’s Allure Changing Perceptions of a Charismatic Carnivore

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m a r k v. b a r r o w j r .

The American alligator (known to scientists as Alligator mississippiensis) is a large, toothy reptile that can grow to sixteen feet or longer. Although it inhabits freshwater swamps, marshes, rivers, and lakes throughout much of the southeastern United States, the species is most abundant in Florida and Louisiana.1 As a member of the order Crocodilia, the alligator belongs to a 230million-year lineage that survived the Cretaceous mass extinction, when a remarkable 85 percent of the earth’s species perished. As a semi-aquatic creature, the alligator moves freely between water and land. And as a large, toplevel carnivore, the species not only projects a menacing presence but also occasionally consumes humans and their pets. Given these many boundary crossings—chronological, geographical, and gastronomical—Americans have long struggled to get a precise handle on this charismatic reptile, and they have thought about it in various (and sometimes contradictory) ways: as a fearsome predator, a landscape symbol, a marketable commodity, an endangered species, and a dangerous nuisance.2 Th is essay explores Euroamericans’ responses to the American alligator, a species that serves as a “repository of meaning,” to borrow historian Richard White’s evocative phrase.3 It seeks to unpack the tangled layers of perception associated with this multivalent vestige of the prehistoric era. What such an examination reveals is not only a long-standing fear of the alligator but also a yearning to tame or domesticate the beast. For centuries, Euroamericans have sought to manipulate and control the natural world, to impose order on 127

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nature while bringing it under human dominion. In the case of the alligator, that urge to master nature initially came in the desire to destroy the fearsome creature. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, a longing to domesticate the alligator—in the sense of making it more docile or adapting it to live in an increasingly human-dominated environment—largely supplanted the urge to simply destroy it. As Florida’s human population continued to rapidly expand, especially in the post–World War II period, the species has been confi ned to smaller and smaller wetland plots, while individual alligators transgressing the artificial boundaries erected to confi ne it face swift and sure destruction. As a result, the American alligator has become a kind of semi-domesticated reptile subjected to intense human surveillance, manipulation, and intervention.4 Yet, the species has not remained a totally passive victim in this process of domestication; rather, it has continually resisted efforts to confi ne it to human-sanctioned habitats, just as it has confounded efforts to encompass it within simplistic views about its biology and behavior. For several decades now, environmental historians have been arguing that the discipline of history needs to take nature more seriously, that historians need to move beyond the unreasonably parochial view that the natural world is simply a backdrop against which human actors have played out their own uniquely compelling drama. Nature has agency, too, advocates of environmental history have insisted, and scholars ought to pay much more attention both to its profound role in shaping our thoughts and lives as well as to the equally profound ways we have transformed the earth.5 As a species that ranges widely across the Florida landscape and occasionally attacks people and pets, the alligator offers a vivid reminder that nature remains a potent force, despite our ongoing efforts to bring it fully under our thumb. The story of the American alligator also reminds us how difficult it is to draw a sharp line between nature and culture, between the so-called real world that exists independent of humanity and the ideas and activities of people.6 The ancient reptile is a tangible physical presence on the landscape, the progeny of a prehistoric lineage that thrived for hundreds of millions of years before humans fi rst walked the earth. Yet, humans have also clearly transformed the alligator since the period when Amerindians began migrating across Beringia at the end of the last Ice Age. For example, although the reptile lacks natural predators once it reaches adulthood, it becomes noticeably skitt ish when humans begin hunting it. Nor has it escaped the barrage of synthetic chemicals that modern industrial society has rained down upon the earth. A 1980 pesticide spill in Lake Apopka, the fourth-largest body of 128

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The Alligator’s Allure

freshwater in Florida, for example, continued to cause reproductive failure in the lake’s alligator population more than a decade later.7 And across the state, alligators suffer symptoms of endocrine system damage, even at sites with no known chemical spills or point-source contaminants.8 The alligator also shows how drawing a sharp distinction between nature and culture proves difficult on a more conceptual level. Our deep-seated views about the ancient reptile’s allegedly aggressive temperament continue to color our perceptions of and interactions with the species, even though naturalists have been arguing for years that it is not a particularly menacing creature. Clearly when we peer into the eyes of an alligator, what we see reflected back is as much a product of our own preconceptions and fears as the unvarnished reality of the creature that stands before us. The complex, contradictory perceptions of the American alligator, its continued resistance to efforts to control it, and its ability to shed light on the blurry boundary between nature and culture not only make the charismatic species “good to think with” but also worthy of scholarly attention.9

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The Alligator as Ferocious Predator Europeans who ventured to the New World beginning in the fi fteenth century feared and loathed the predators they encountered there. For nearly three decades now, scholars have been documenting how large carnivores came not only to be reviled but also systematically destroyed in America.10 Part of that reaction stemmed from the potential threat these predators posed to settlers themselves and the actual threat they posed to the sett lers’ livestock; but much of it was also more primal, a response that the nature writer Barry Lopez has dubbed “theriophobia,” or “[f]ear of the beast as an irrational, violent, insatiable killer.”11 Until recently, Westerners have tended to perceive large predators as evil and crusades to exterminate them as part of a divinely ordained mission to carry the torch of civilization to a dark, forbidding American wilderness.12 In the process of implementing that mandate, Europeans and their descendents have engaged in unthinkably cruel behavior toward predatory species, particularly the gray wolf, which they have tortured and killed with abandon. While systematic predator-control programs generally failed to target alligators, European sett lers also viewed this giant, water-loving reptile as an evil, threatening presence. That response was strongly influenced by preexisting views of the Nile crocodile, a beast not only notorious for attacking humans but also a source of inspiration for the Leviathan, the hideous, de129 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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monic monster depicted in the Old Testament.13 The fi rst-century naturalist Pliny the Elder damned the crocodile as “a curse on four legs, and equally pernicious on land.”14 Medieval bestiaries featured images of the reptile consuming humans, while characterizing it as “fearefull, ravening, malitious, and treacherous.”15 Given all this cultural baggage, it is hardly surprising that when Christopher Columbus’s son Don Ferdinand landed on the coast of the island now known as Haiti in 1497, he reported seeing “vast, great crocodiles” that were “so ravenous and cruel that if they fi nd a man sleeping, they drag him to the water to devour him.”16 Seventy years later, when the French artist Jacques Le Moyne encountered an alligator during his explorations in Florida, he depicted it as a giant, marauding beast attacking a native village.17 Two centuries later, the Philadelphia naturalist William Bartram continued this long-standing tradition of vilification. Bartram’s widely read Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (1791) not only offered a vivid account of his nearly four-year journey through the wilds of the southeastern United States but also proved an important source of inspiration for a later generation of romantic writers.18 As a Quaker with pantheistic leanings, Bartram celebrated the beauty and utility of southern flora and fauna, which he saw as evidence of God’s active presence in the world. But he made an exception for the alligator, which he considered a regional

A Florida Man Eater, ca. 1910. Alligators have long been considered ferocious predators with a taste for human flesh, as in the toothy, menacing reptile depicted on this earlytwentieth-century souvenir postcard. (Author’s collection)

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The Alligator’s Allure

name for the Nile crocodile. The report of alligators attacking his canoe along the St. Johns River, in north Florida, remains one of the most famous and memorable passages from his book:

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Behold his rushing forth from flags and reeds. His enormous body swells. His plaited tail, brandished high, floats upon the lake. The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder. . . . I was attacked from all sides, several endeavoring to overset the canoe. . . . [T]wo very large ones att acked me closely . . . roaring terribly and belching floods of water over me.19

According to Bartram, only through judicious application of a wooden club did he manage to extricate himself from the jaws of these dangerous reptiles. Whether they accepted or refuted Bartram’s account, it remained the touchstone for those attempting to understand the American alligator and its behavior. As early as the 1840s, the South Carolina herpetologist John Edwards Holbrook challenged Bartram’s assertion about the ferocity of the alligator, but Holbrook’s protests seem to have largely fallen on deaf ears.20 More influential on perceptions of the beast (because it was more consistent with deeply held views of crocodilian nature) was the British novelist Frances M. Trollope’s 1832 report of a American sett ler who awakened one night to fi nd “the relics of three of his children scattered over the floor, and an enormous crocodile, with several young ones around her, occupied in devouring the remnants of their horrid meal.” After fleeing for help, the hapless husband returned to fi nd that “the reptile had eaten his wife and two more children.”21 Challenging pervasive myths about alligator behavior has not been easy, in part because naturalists were relatively slow to take up systematic study of the species. The fi rst scientific monograph treating the reptile, Albert Moore Reese’s The Alligator and Its Allies, did not appear until 1915.22 Based on his experience, Reese argued that the alligator was not a particularly aggressive species. While it would defend itself when cornered, like most other wild animals, he also reported that “it will always flee from man if possible, and the writer has frequently waded and swam in ponds and lakes where alligators lived without the least fear of attack.” Reese did admit that this might not have been possible in the days when alligators were “more numerous and had not been intimidated by man and his weapons.” Two decades later, the wealthy Louisiana entrepreneur, sportsman, conservationist, and amateur naturalist Edward A. McIlhenny published the fi rst monograph on the alligator’s life history.23 He based his book largely on fi rsthand observations made during more than five decades in the area 131

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surrounding his family’s 6,000-acre estate on Avery Island, the site of prime alligator habitat. He and his boyhood playmates felt so litt le fear of the species that they even made a game of pelting large alligators with mud.24 While acknowledging that the reptile could kill livestock, even a full-grown cow, McIlhenny denied that it would attack humans unless provoked by hunters or trappers trying to capture it. Forty years later, the wildlife biologist Kent Vliet offered a more striking refutation of the widely held view that the American alligator is a particularly aggressive species with a taste for human flesh. Vliet believed that to understand alligator behavior, he needed to get as close to his research subjects as possible, to position himself at their level to discern subtle visual cues that might remain undetected from afar. In a memorable National Geographic television special that fi rst aired in 1986, Realm of the Alligator, he demonstrated his study technique by wading up to his neck in a small lake brimming with large captive alligators.25 Armed with only a five-foot stick, he approached within a few feet of several gators, which, rather than att acking, seemed relatively indifferent to his presence. Vliet’s demonstration led the nature writer Diane Ackerman to question her own assumptions about alligator aggressiveness, but it seems to have had litt le effect on assuaging public fears about the possibility of alligator attack.26 To be sure, alligators do assault humans, but only rarely. Since the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission began keeping statistics on the subject in 1948, alligators have attacked 475 individuals, resulting in twenty deaths.27 That’s an average of just over eight attacks per year and a death every three years in a state that is now bursting at the seams with just over 18 million human residents and an estimated 2 million alligators. Yet, because those incidents invariably receive extensive, lurid media coverage, they skew public perceptions about not only the risk of alligator attacks but also the aggressiveness of the species. The periodic release of horror movies featuring terrifying man-eating alligators (or even crocodiles, since most people are unable to distinguish between the two) further reinforces the image that the species is a fearsome beast with a penchant for human flesh.28

The Alligator as Symbol of the Florida Landscape Layered onto and related to the perception of the alligator as a fierce, maneating predator is the view of the species as a symbol of the landscape it inhabits. By the 1570s, European artists had crafted a set of icons to represent America.29 For example, the symbol for that newly discovered land in Cesare 132

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The Alligator’s Allure

Ripa’s Iconologia (1603), the manual baroque artists relied on for guidance on how to present abstract ideas, featured a native woman “almost naked,” with a feathered head ornament, a bow, and a human arrow-pierced head (suggesting cannibalism) and a crudely drawn crocodilian at her feet. “The Lizard[s], they are so big here,” Ripa noted in the accompanying text, “that they devour Men.”30 Well into the eighteenth century, the cartouches on maps of British America (e.g., Henry Popple’s 1733 map, published in Amsterdam in 1737) and East Florida (e.g., Bernard Romans’s 1774 map, published in New York in 1781) continued to prominently feature alligators or other crocodilians as symbols of the American landscape.31 So did a variety of paintings, engravings, porcelain figurines, and sculptures produced until the middle of the nineteenth century. In many of these depictions, a female Native American rides on the back of a crocodilian, an image hinting at domestication of the species that would loom large in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century souvenir photographs and postcards.32 While alligators and other crocodilians became prominent symbols of the New World, few Americans had the opportunity to view live alligators in their native haunts until the second half of the nineteenth century. Before the Civil War, when the tourist industry in the United States was primarily regional in scope and limited in size, only a small number of naturalists, sportsmen, and health-seeking invalids made the trek to sparsely populated Florida.33 Although steamboats began regularly traveling from Savannah, Georgia, to Jacksonville, Florida, in 1845, a relative lack of infrastructure to support large-scale tourism kept visitation to a minimum. After the war, new hotels sprouted up in Jacksonville (the gateway city to the state until the early twentieth century) and other popular tourist destinations, while new steamship and railroad lines eased inland transportation. At the same time, northern newspapers and magazines extolled Florida as a “sunny, exotic, and healthful destination,” while newly issued guidebooks beckoned would-be visitors with enticing descriptions of att ractions along with helpful advice about traveling through the region.34 As a result, a growing number of middle- and upper-class Americans flocked to the state, especially during the winter months. Excursions on river steamers provided one of the most popular pastimes for Florida tourists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.35 Steamboats fi rst began plying the St. Johns River in the 1830s, carrying goods and passengers from Jacksonville and penetrating more than two hundred miles southward into what the author Harriet Beecher Stowe called the “mysteries and wonders” of the Florida wilderness.36 Starting in the 1860s, 133

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seasonal visitors could also travel down the Ocklawaha River, which empties into the St. Johns River about one hundred miles south of Jacksonville. Specially designed steamboats navigated the narrow, meandering river during the twenty-four-hour journey from Palatka to Silver Springs, a trip that featured picturesque scenes of towering palm trees, moss-draped cypresses, and an abundance of exotic wildlife.37 As the travel writer Kirk Monroe noted in 1883, the “star and leading attraction” of these excursions were the alligators that swam in the rivers and lined the banks.38 The earliest passengers typically responded to sightings of the prominent reptile as they did with other wildlife: with a barrage of gunfi re. The naturalist Edward Howe Forbush, who traveled down the St. Johns River in 1876, protested the needless carnage infl icted by heavily armed passengers who “shot ad libidum at alligators, waterfowl, or anything that made an att ractive target.”39 Fearful that indiscriminate shooting was decimating alligator and other wildlife populations along the rivers—the very att ractions their customers found so alluring—steamboat owners banned the practice by the 1880s. While the construction of a vast railroad network and the introduction of the automobile gradually spelled the doom of steamboat excursions along Florida’s picturesque rivers, they failed to dampen tourists’ enthusiasm for alligators. In 1893, the entrepreneur Edward Whitney began exhibiting live specimens of the reptiles in conjunction with his souvenir shop and natural history museum, located at the end of a three-mile tramline that ran from downtown St. Augustine.40 Curiosity and souvenir shop owners had long displayed an alligator or two to lure customers to their doors.41 But Whitney and his partners began exhibiting large numbers of the beasts as part of an att raction dubbed an “alligator farm.” The name suggests not only that alligators were domesticated but also that they were bred at the attraction, though virtually all of the captive alligators were taken from the wild. Competing businesses soon sprung up across the state.42 To keep the public coming back, alligator farm owners developed a variety of shows featuring the charismatic saurian. The most popular and enduring of these was an act dubbed “alligator wrestling,” in which a trainer ran through various maneuvers with a large specimen, tricks like turning the reptile on its back and rubbing its stomach to “hypnotize” it, pulling its jaws apart while sitting on its back, and pinning the reptile’s jaws between his chin and chest.43 Some particularly intrepid wrestlers performed at least part of their routine underwater, much to the delight of audiences. The continuing popularity of the practice was based on the widely shared perception that the alligator was 13 4

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The Alligator’s Allure

The South Beach Alligator Farm, 1910. The South Beach Alligator Farm began in 1893 as an adjunct to Edward Whitney’s museum and souvenir shop, three miles south of St. Augustine. The attraction was later renamed the St. Augustine Alligator Farm, which remains open to this day. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-122852

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DLC)

a fierce, aggressive beast; the symbolic domination of the species the activity suggested; and the very real possibility of injury when handlers became careless. The idea of the alligator as symbol of the Florida landscape received further elaboration when the University of Florida adopted the reptile as its mascot.44 In 1907, just two years after the state legislature established the institution of higher education at Gainesville, a local drug and stationery store owner named Phillip Miller placed an order for pennants and banners to sell at his establishment. When the manufacturer inquired about the school’s mascot, Miller replied that it had none. His son then recommended the alligator, a species long associated with the state. Unveiled in the fall of 1908, the new mascot quickly caught on with students, administrators, and the general public. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then, the alligator had cemented its reputation as a preeminent symbol of the Florida landscape. Indeed, the British author Iza D. Hardy titled the 1886 account of her travels in south Florida Oranges and Alligators, linking the reptile to another enduring icon of the Sunshine State.45 So did the Alligator Brand citrus-crate label from the 1920s and 1930s, which featured a fanciful, humanlike alligator standing upright on two legs and carrying a tray of oranges, a pose reminiscent of the comical stuffed alligators peddled at tourist shops at the time and often included in souvenir portraits taken in photography studios.46 Here the fearsome alligator has been entirely domesticated, remade into a docile creature serving human ends.47 135

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Alligator Brand citrus label, 1920s–1930s. In the second half of the nineteenth century, citrus became one of Florida’s most important agricultural commodities. Growers and packers promoted brand loyalty through colorful labels attached to wooden crates containing their fruit. This striking citrus label depicts an apparently tame (though still vaguely menacing) alligator standing on two legs and serving a tray of oranges. (Author’s

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collection)

The Alligator as Commodity The third conceptual fi lter through which Americans tended to view the alligator, and indeed much of the American landscape, was as a potential or actual commodity.48 A key factor luring Euroamericans to the New World was the superabundance of natural resources found there. Sett lers sought to turn a profit from this seemingly limitless natural bounty—to extract marketable plants, animals, and minerals from the landscape and incorporate them into a vast commercial web that stretched across the Atlantic and beyond. Th is process of commodifying nature began slowly at fi rst, but picked up steam with the development of ever more swift and reliable transportation networks—rivers, canals, roads, and especially railroads—that linked the continent together, thereby increasing the potential scope, scale, and speed of commercial exchange. While the alligator was commodified on only a limited scale until the second half of the nineteenth century, like most other wildlife it was regu136

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The Alligator’s Allure

larly utilized both by the Native Americans and Euroamericans who lived within its geographical range.49 The Natchez Indians, for example, reportedly fashioned alligator skins into ceremonial drums played with scratching sticks. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Euroamericans experimented with extracting oil from the reptile’s fat, which they used to render indigo dye, grease machinery, and formulate liniment. Alligator musk glands, like those of other crocodilians, were sometimes employed in the manufacture of perfume. Sett lers also used carved alligator teeth as chargers to store gunpowder. And Native Americans and sett lers alike consumed alligator meat, although the latter varied greatly in their opinions about its palatability. In the early nineteenth century, tanners began fashioning alligator hides into leather for boots, shoes, and saddles.50 But the resulting leather was not only expensive but also quite porous, and hence not sufficiently waterproof for most applications. The blockade of the South during the American Civil War fostered increased demand for alligator leather in southern states, but interest diminished with the cessation of hostilities. Beginning around 1869, however, growing markets for luxury goods of all sorts and the development of better tanning techniques greatly boosted the demand for alligator hide. Manufacturers crafted alligator leather, tanned hide taken from the underside of the animal, into a wide variety of expensive goods, such as shoes, belts, purses, wallets, travel cases, and card cases. The striking reticulated pattern of the reptile’s leather was one characteristic that made it so desirable, but so was the fact that it came from an allegedly fierce beast. By the end of the nineteenth century, the alligator trade had become significant enough for the U.S. Department of Commerce to begin tracking its economic dimensions. According to a federal report from 1893, Florida represented the center of that trade, with as many as 2.5 million hides having been shipped out of the state since 1880.51 The price that hunters received varied from about fi ft y cents for a four-foot hide to about $1.50 for a sevenfoot hide. Jacksonville was the leading city in the trade, and two fi rms that purchased hides from hunters and other dealers (mostly in the less sett led, southern part of the state) handled about sixty thousand skins in 1889 and about twenty thousand in 1890. Excessive harvest levels continued well into the twentieth century. In 1929, Florida dealers alone handled 190,000 alligator hides that fetched an average of about $1.50 each.52 By 1939, the price had increased to $5.25 per hide, while the overall harvest had declined to about half its 1929 level. A year later, the going rate for hides was $7.00 each, and about seventy-five thousand 137

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Tanned alligator hide, 1902. Commercial hunting of alligators for their hides noticeably reduced populations of the species by the second half of the nineteenth century. Continued commodification and habitat destruction in the post–World War II period nearly drove the species to extinction. Once tanned, the pliable underside of the alligator (left) was fashioned into purses, wallets, belts, shoes, and other expensive leather goods. (From Charles H. Stevenson, Utilization of the Skins of Aquatic Animals [Washington, D.C., 1903], plate 36)

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The Alligator’s Allure

of them were brought to market. The sharp increase in the price of alligator hides coupled with the gradual decrease in the total number harvested suggests continued strong demand for alligator products accompanied by a decline in their populations. In addition to luxury leather goods, alligators were also fashioned into saurian souvenirs for the tourist trade. Craftsmen polished and carved alligator teeth, shaping them into whistles and a variety of jewelry, such as brooches and bracelets.53 Taxidermists stuffed alligators, sometimes placing them in comical humanlike poses. And store owners offered live baby alligators for tourists to take home with them, thus leading to the pervasive urban myth about the species inhabiting the sewers of New York after their owners flushed them down the toilet.54 In 1890 alone, Jacksonville visitors purchased over eight thousand live alligators and 450 pounds of alligator teeth, while forty people in that town gained employment stuffi ng alligators and polishing teeth.55 Souvenir and curio shops also boasted a bewildering variety of goods depicting the alligator, ranging from carved walking canes and smoking pipes to silver spoons, knives, and enameled jewelry.56 The Jacksonville fi rm of J. Osky, founded in 1884, was one of the most enduring curio dealers to feature not only a variety of products made from the popular species but also “Monster Live Alligators on Free Exhibition.”57 By 1893, the city of Jacksonville boasted twelve dealers in alligators and eighteen curio dealers whose inventories featured products made from or depicting the species. Most of these establishments were located on Bay Street, near the wharf where steamers docked, a bustling thoroughfare that one guidebook thought might be more appropriately called “Alligator Street.”58 Alligator farms represented another form of commodification of the species. By 1930, with the increase in tourist traffic associated with mass adoption of the automobile, at least a dozen of these popular roadside att ractions had sprouted across the state. The largest of them, in South Jacksonville, contained twelve thousand alligators, while its main competitor in St. Augustine boasted more than six thousand of the popular reptiles.59 Most alligator farms also stocked a variety of alligator-related products—picture postcards, miniature alligators made of various materials, stuffed alligators, tanned hides, and an assortment of fi nished leather goods, ranging from small novelty articles to more expensive handbags and suitcases. In the 1940s, the American naturalist Thomas Barbour noted with tongue in cheek that Florida roadside att ractions held enough alligators to “repopulate the state if there were money available to buy them up and turn them loose.”60 139

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The Alligator as Endangered Species: The Early Years Increasing commodification of the alligator, which led to a drastic decline in its population, gradually fostered concern about the future of the species. That concern evolved through several phases, beginning with a handful of scattered statements lamenting the local loss of the species that began appearing in the nineteenth century. By the fi rst half of the twentieth century, those calls of alarm increased in number and urgency, leading officials in Florida and Louisiana to institute fi rst local and then statewide protection. Continued destruction of the alligator’s habitat, extensive poaching, and the rise of the modern environmental movement fi nally led the federal government to intervene on behalf of the species in the late 1960s, when it experienced a dramatic recovery. Local and state officials established various laws regulating the hunting of North American game species from the colonial period on. But systematic protection of wildlife failed to begin in earnest until the mid-nineteenth century, when a growing community of sportsmen pushed for state laws that established closed seasons for game species, created fish and game commissions, and mandated hunting licenses.61 Near the end of the nineteenth century, a second phase of wildlife conservation began when a broad coalition of naturalists, humanitarians, and nature lovers joined together in the Audubon movement, which focused on nongame wildlife.62 Participants in the movement organized Audubon societies, lobbied for state legislation to protect nongame species (especially birds), and established educational campaigns to garner widespread support for wildlife. Sport hunters and Audubon society members, who found a common enemy in large-scale commercial hunting, managed to close down the market for numerous rapidly diminishing species by the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, the alligator failed to gain support in the campaign that rescued the American bison, several plume birds, and other species from the jaws of extinction. That is not to say that the decline of the species went unnoticed. As early as 1814, the lawyer and author H. M. Brackenridge noted that overhunting of the alligator had led to its decline in Louisiana.63 Later in the century, Kirk Monroe ended his 1892 account of a Florida alligator hunt with the warning that brisk demand for alligator leather would continue until “the last of these uncouth monsters, together with all the buffalo in the west and the fur seal of the North, shall have disappeared from the face of the earth.”64 In 1908, the Wall Street banker-turned-adventurer A. W. Dimock lamented “the passing of the Florida alligator,” and called for conservationists to devote more atten140 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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tion to the species: “It is up to us who claim to be nature-lovers to look after the Florida alligator. . . . We are working, almost without hope, for birds that are nearly extinct and animals which have been banished from their environments by the requirements of civilization, but we are neglecting a creature whose existence is imperiled, although his habitat is secure, his sustenance is not threatened, and he needs only to be let alone to restore life and att ractiveness to the waterways of a great national playground.”65 Naturalists also weighed in on the issue. Albert Reese was equivocal about the future of the species; he refused to speculate about whether “wholesale destruction by sportsman and native hunter will eventually exterminate our giant reptile,” but thought it likely that a few alligators would survive as long as remote habitats like the Everglades and the Okefenokee remained inaccessible. Two decades later, E. A. McIlhenny lamented the obvious decline of the species while arguing that the “actual extermination of these harmless and picturesque reptiles is not an immediate danger.”66 E. Ross Allen, a herpetologist and owner of a popular roadside att raction named the Florida Reptile Institute, was more pessimistic, and in 1935 he began a long crusade to gain local and state protection for the species.67 Facing increasing pressure to respond to the decline in the number of alligator hides being brought to market despite strong demand, officials in Florida and Louisiana took tentative steps toward protecting the alligator.68 As early as 1926, Louisiana passed a bill prohibiting alligator hunting for much of the year, but the new law exempted the fourteen coastal parishes with the best habitat for the species. During this same period, several Florida counties instituted closed seasons on the alligator. Not until 1943, however, following a sharp decline in the number of hides delivered to dealers, did the State of Florida provide protection for the increasingly beleaguered species. The new law prohibited hunting the alligator during its breeding season and young less than four feet long at all times during the year.69 Yet, the alligator population continued to decline.

From Endangered Species to Nuisance The second half of the twentieth century not only saw increasing threats to the American alligator but also an accompanying increase in efforts to rescue it from the threat of extinction. The introduction of air-conditioning and the initiation of large-scale mosquito spraying programs after World II ushered in a period of dramatic growth in Florida.70 Between 1940 and 1970, the state’s population more than tripled, from 1.9 million to 7 million residents, leading 141

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to unprecedented demand for land.71 Prime alligator habitat was lost not only to housing tracts, roads, and strip malls but also to agricultural production. In addition, the alligator faced renewed pressure from hunters responding to a growing postwar demand for alligator leather. Accompanying (and to some degree countering) these demographic and economic transformations was the emergence of the postwar environmental movement.72 Heightened levels of affluence, better access to higher education, the popularization of basic ecological concepts, and increased leisurecontext interaction with the natural world fostered growing fears about the environmental costs associated with unbridled development. As a potent symbol of wilderness under threat, the alligator gained support from environmentalists who feared for the future of the species and who began aggressively lobbying on its behalf. Naturalists, nature-lovers, game officials, and wildlife conservationists joined forces to secure more stringent regulations in Florida (which closed the hunting season on alligators in 1961), Louisiana (which did the same in 1963), and other states with remnant populations of the species.73 These laws did nothing to slow the rate of habitat destruction, however, particularly in Florida, and they failed to stop alligator poaching, which thrived despite closed seasons on the reptile. Growing concern about the fate of the alligator and other vanishing wildlife species fi nally led to action at the federal level.74 The initial step came in 1964, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service established a Committee on Rare and Endangered Wildlife Species composed of nine agency biologists and wildlife managers. By August of that year, the committee issued a preliminary copy of its “Redbook”—the fi rst official federal list of native endangered wildlife.75 The American alligator was included among the sixtythree vertebrate species facing extinction. Two years later, Congress passed the fi rst Endangered Species Act, which authorized up to $5 million annually to purchase protective refuges for native species. While the alligator was one of the seventy-eight species declared endangered under the terms of the new law, the bill failed to address the ongoing problem of illegal poaching anywhere other than at federal refuges.76 And it did nothing to stop commercial trade in illegally obtained alligator hides. Frustrated at the failure to rescue the beleaguered species, the Ph.D.trained herpetologist Archie Carr, who was internationally renowned for his scientific and conservation work on behalf of sea turtles, entered the fray.77 In 1967, Carr published an article in National Geographic entitled “Alligators: Dragons in Distress.”78 In lyrical prose, he recounted his fi rst encounter with

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the voice of the alligator in a cypress swamp not far from the St. Johns River in Florida. There, on a clear spring night, he experienced three alligators bellowing in a “ponderous, pulsing chorus, half sound, half shaking of the earth” that “seemed to rock the whole swamp.” Now, several decades later, the same site was hushed, its gators vanished and its cypresses having long since been transformed into lumber: “The roar of the alligator, rolling out of the mist of April marshes, is one of the great animal sounds of the world. It is a song 200 million years old, an echo of the Age of Reptiles, when cold-blooded creatures ruled the earth. But now the incredible voice is falling silent, and the needless loss will not sit well with our descendents.”79 To save the reptile, Carr called for a change in fashion to eliminate demand for alligator products and an extension of the Lacey Act—a federal law passed in 1900 that forbid taking illegally caught birds and mammals across state lines—to include alligators. In 1968, Carr joined with several fellow gator enthusiasts—including amateur and professional naturalists, state legislators, game officials, Audubon Society members, and others—to create a loose-knit organization dedicated to “restoring the alligator to a balanced population as an observable part of the natural environment.”80 Over the next four years, the newly created American Alligator Council hosted a series of research symposia on the species, successfully lobbied for local and state laws outlawing the sale of alligator products, and initiated an educational program to elicit support for the reptile’s conservation. Responding to pressure from this and a host of other environmental organizations, Congress passed a broadened Endangered Species Act in 1969. Prominent among its provisions was an expansion of the Lacey Act along the lines Carr had advocated two years earlier.81 Because it was now illegal to engage in interstate commerce in unlawfully taken reptiles, poachers experienced much greater difficulty bringing gator hides to market. Then something remarkable happened that seemed to surprise almost everyone: the alligator population quickly rebounded. We have no fi rm figures on the overall population at the time of the passage of the Endangered Species Act of 1969 or its much more restrictive version in 1973, but anecdotal evidence suggests a rapid, dramatic recovery of the species across much of its historic range.82 Confident that the species was no longer in danger, as early as 1972, the Louisiana Fish and Game Commission began a limited experimental hunt of the alligator. By 1975, the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission was responding to about five thousand complaints per year

1 43 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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m a r k v. b a r r o w j r .

involving “nuisance” alligators that had ventured too close to humans, and it was relocating about two thousand of them.83 The commission complained that the relocation program was a failure, though, because Florida’s waters were already fully stocked with gators that, when transplanted, had a knack for fi nding their way back to their original home. Moreover, the agency argued that it lacked the resources to deal with the growing problem. Commission leaders pushed for a program that allowed contracted private agents to “harvest” nuisance alligators, with the sale of hides used to compensate the hunters and recoup administrative costs.84 They were barred from doing so, however, as long as the federal government listed the alligator as “endangered” and the sale of alligator products remained unlawful in many states and localities. The proposal to routinely kill rather than relocate nuisance alligators and to reopen the then illegal trade in alligator products sparked a contentious debate among wildlife enthusiasts. Preservationist-oriented naturalists like Archie Carr, Wayne King (curator of reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History in New York), and others strongly opposed the idea of recommodifying the giant reptile they had struggled to remove from the marketplace. They worried about the negative effect not only on the American alligator, but also the other twenty-two crocodilian species that were subjected to international trade. Many of these species were also threatened or endangered, and distinguishing between them proved difficult, especially once their hides had been processed. The issue provoked a split in the American Alligator Council between preservationists who argued that resuming legal trade in the alligator was a mistake and utilitarian conservationists who argued that selective harvesting and sale of the species was essential to its continued survival.85 In the end, the pressure to renew trade in alligators proved too strong to resist. Responding to estimates showing robust populations across much of its historic range and pressure from state game officials, in 1975, the Fish and Wildlife Service down-listed from “endangered” to “threatened” the alligator populations of several Louisiana parishes.86 Two years later, the federal agency reclassified the alligator throughout much of the rest of its range as well, thus allowing the possibility of controlled hunting and renewed commercial trade in the species.87 In 1978, the State of Florida began a control program using private contractors fi nanced through the sale of alligator hides and, beginning in 1980, alligator meat. Many in the fi rst corps of statecontracted alligator “trappers” had previously been poachers.88

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The Alligator’s Allure

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Conclusion The alligator remains a complex, compelling creature. Today tourists entering Florida on Interstate 95, one of the main arteries providing a gateway to the state, soon encounter a billboard featuring a massive, menacing portrait of the reptile. An advertisement for a tourist shop and information center that exhibits a thirteen-foot alligator, the billboard serves as a vivid reminder of several ways Americans have come to view the species: as a fearsome beast, as a symbol of the landscape, and as a valuable commodity. So do similar billboards not far down that same highway beckoning tourists to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm, which remains a popular att raction more than a century after it fi rst opened its gates in 1893. Clearly this strange, fearsome relic from the prehistoric age continues to fascinate tourists. Florida residents also offer a limited welcome to alligators.89 They seem to relish the idea that this ancient, charismatic icon—the remnant of a rapidly vanishing wild Florida and once endangered species—continues to thrive in one of the fastest-growing states in the nation. But that welcome quickly wears thin when alligators venture into residential areas, as they do with increasingly regularity. When this happens, the offending reptile is generally subject to immediate harvest by licensed private trappers, who sell its skin and meat in a highly regulated market. Aware that their actions might anger or offend those Florida residents who value the species as a tangible reminder of the state’s wild heritage, the trappers usually capture so-called nuisance alligators alive and kill them only after transporting them far from public view. More than ten thousand mature alligators per year face destruction through Florida’s nuisance alligator program. The vast majority of them are guilty of nothing more than growing more than four feet long, moving through areas where they might come into contact with humans, and acting “aggressive” (which in most instances means simply refusing to immediately flee in the presence of humans or their pets). Thus, paradoxically, the species that now serves as a poster child trumpeting the success of the Endangered Species Act continues to exist only through intense human management.90 For centuries, Westerners have dreamed of taming this frightening beast; now they have gone a long way toward achieving that goal.

1 45 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

m a r k v. b a r r o w j r .

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Notes 1. The only other species of alligator is the Chinese alligator (Alligator sinensis), a much smaller, critically endangered reptile that inhabits freshwater wetlands around the lower Yangtze River in China. See the entry at the “Crocodilian Species” Web site, www.fl mnh.ufl .edu/cnhc/csp_asin.htm. 2. On the cultural history of the American alligator, see Wilfred T. Neill, The Last of the Ruling Reptiles: Alligators, Crocodiles, and Their Kin (New York, 1971); Vaughn L. Glasgow, A Social History of the American Alligator: The Earth Trembles with His Thunder (New York, 1991); and Jay Mechling, “The Alligator,” in American Wildlife in Symbol and Story, ed. Angus K. Gillespie and Mechling, 73–98 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1987). See also Kevin M. McCarthy, ed., Alligator Tales (Sarasota, Fla., 1998); Martha A. Strawn, Alligators: Prehistoric Presence in the American Landscape (Baltimore, 1997); C. C. Lockwood, The Alligator Book (Baton Rouge, La., 2002); and Sherman A. Minton Jr. and Madge Rugherford Minton, Giant Reptiles (New York, 1973). 3. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, 1995), 90. White was referring specifically to salmon that inhabit the Columbia River, but his point applies equally well to many forms of wildlife. 4. My thinking about the alligator as a semi-domesticated creature has been influenced by Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge, U.K., 2000), 165; see also Christopher R. Eck, “Beasts and Savages: Taming the ‘Wilds’ of Florida in the Popular Imagination for Five Centuries,” South Florida History 29.3 (2001): 12–19. 5. A recent example of this call is found in Ted Steinberg, “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and History,” American Historical Review 107.3 (2002): 798–820. See also Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York, 2002). 6. Mart Stewart highlights how exploring the nature/culture relationship has formed a central theme in the field in his essay “Environmental History: Profi le of a Developing Field,” History Teacher 31 (May 1998): 350–68. Over the past decade or so, numerous scholars have stressed the challenging conceptual difficulties involved in differentiating between nature and culture (see, for example, Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education [New York, 1991]; and William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature [New York, 1995]). 7. The episode is summarized in Theo Colburn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers, Our Stolen Future (New York, 1997), 151–53. 8. Louis J. Gillette Jr. et al., “Alligators and Endocrine Disrupting Contaminants: A Current Perspective,” American Zoologist 40 (2000): 438–52. 9. The suggestive phrase is from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism (Boston, 1963), 89; see also the recent anthology Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, ed. Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (New York, 2005). 146 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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The Alligator’s Allure 10. The literature on American att itudes and policies related to predators, especially the wolf, is vast and growing (see, for example, Thomas Dunlap, Saving America’s Wildlife [Princeton, N.J., 1988]; Barry H. Lopez, Of Wolves and Men [New York, 1978]; and Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America [New Haven, Ct., 2004]). Timothy Rawson, Changing Tracks: Predators and Politics in Mt. McKinley National Park (Fairbanks, Alaska, 2001), counts no fewer than thirty nonfiction adult books on wolves between 1978 and 2001. On att itudes toward predators more broadly, see David Quammen, Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungle of History and the Mind (New York, 2003). 11. Lopez, Of Wolves and Men, 190. 12. See, for example, Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven, Ct., 1982). 13. Alistair Graham and Peter Beard, Eyelids of Morning: The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles and Men (Greenwich, Ct., 1973); C. A. W. Guggisberg, Crocodiles: Their Natural History, Folklore, and Conservation (Harrisburg, Pa., 1972), 19–21. 14. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, bk. 8, 37–38, quoted in the wonderful Web site “The Medieval Bestiary,” htt p://bestiary.ca./beasts/beast146.htm. 15. Quoted in Neill, Last of the Ruling Reptiles, 362. 16. Quoted in Minton and Minton, Giant Reptiles, 21. 17. A convenient source of Le Moyne’s image is “Exploring Florida: A Social Studies Resource for Students and Teachers,” produced by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology, University of South Florida, htt p://fcit.usf.edu/florida/ photos/native/lemoyne/lemoyne.htm. 18. William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territory of the Muscogugles, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Choctaws (Philadelphia, 1791). See also the heavily annotated “Naturalist’s Edition” of this book, edited by Francis Harper (New Haven, Ct., 1958), which is the version used here. 19. Bartram, Travels, 75–76. 20. John Edwards Holbrook, North American Herpetology, (1842; repr., Athens, Ohio, 1976). Holbrook’s account of the American alligator is also reproduced in South Carolina Naturalists: An Anthology, 1700–1860, ed. David Taylor (Columbia, S.C., 1998), 126–33. 21. Quoted in Neill, Last of the Ruling Reptiles, 28. 22. Biographical information on Reese may be found in Allen G. Debus, World Who’s Who in Science: A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Scientists from Antiquity to the Present (Chicago, 1968), 1404; and Albert M. Reese, The Alligator and Its Allies (New York, 1915). 23. Edward A. McIlhenny, The Alligator’s Life History (Boston, 1935). For biographical information on McIlhenny, see George H. Lowery Jr., “Edward Avery McIlhenny,” Auk 68 (January 1951): 135; and Shane K. Bernard, Tabasco, an Illustrated History: The Story of the McIlhenny Family of Avery Island (Avery Island, La., 2007). 147 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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m a r k v. b a r r o w j r . 24. McIlhenny, The Alligator’s Life History, 7. 25. John Paling, producer, Realm of the Alligator (Stamford, Ct., 1986). 26. Diane Ackerman, “A Reporter at Large: Crocodilians,” New Yorker 64 (10 October 1988): 42–46, 51–58, 63–81. 27. See the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, “Historic Alligator Bites on Humans in Florida,” www.myfwc.com/docs/WildlifeHabitats/ Alligator_GatorBites.pdf. Figures are as of August 2008, and they include 162 attacks that were “provoked,” that is, they occurred when an alligator was being intentionally handled, moved, or harassed. 28. See, for example, Alligator, released in 1980, which traces the exploits of a giant, ravenous alligator on the loose in Chicago’s sewers. “The Internet Movie Database (IMDb),” www.imdb.com, lists more than a dozen motion pictures with plot summaries that include fearsome alligators. 29. On this and other New World iconography, see Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York, 1975), 84–117. 30. The quotation is from the 1709 edition, available at htt p://emblem.libraries. psu.edu/Ripa/Images/ripa053a.htm. 31. Both images are available at the Library of Congress “American Memory” Web site, htt p://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html. 32. See, for example, Honour, The New Golden Land, 110, 112. 33. On the development of tourism in America, see Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C., 1995); John Jackle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century America (Lincoln, Neb., 1985); and Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, D.C., 2001). The defi nitive history of Florida tourism has yet to appear, but some places to start include: Ken Breslauer, Roadside Paradise: The Golden Age of Florida’s Tourist Att ractions, 1929–1971 (St. Petersburg, Fla., 2000); Tim Hollis, Dixie before Disney: 100 Years of Roadside Fun (Jackson, Miss., 1999); Elliott J. Mackle, “The Eden of the South: Florida’s Image in American Travel Literature and Painting, 1865–1900” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1977); Larry Roberts, Florida’s Golden Age of Souvenirs, 1890–1930 (Gainesville, Fla., 2001); and Floyd and Marion Rinhart, Victorian Florida (Atlanta, 1986). 34. Roberts, Florida’s Golden Age, 5. 35. On steamboat travel on the St. Johns River, see Edward A. Mueller, Steamboating on the St. Johns, 1830–1885 (Melbourne, Fla., 1980); on the Ocklawaha River, see Edward A. Mueller, Ocklawaha River Steamboats (Jacksonville, Fla., 1983); C. Bradford Mitchell, Paddle-Wheel Inboard: Some History of the Ocklawaha River Steamboating and of the Hart Line (1947; Providence, R.I., 1983); and Steven Noll, “Steamboats, Cypress, and Tourism: An Ecological History of the Ocklawaha Valley in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Florida Historical Quarterly 83.1 (2004): 6–23.

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The Alligator’s Allure The most recent treatment of the subject is Bob Bass, When Steamboats Ruled in Florida (Gainesville, Fla., 2008). 36. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Palmetto Leaves (1873; facsimile ed., Gainesville, Fla., 1968), 247. 37. On the history of Silver Springs, see Richard A. Martin, Eternal Spring: Man’s 10,000 Years of History at Florida’s Silver Springs (St. Petersburg, Fla., 1966). 38. Kirk Monroe, “A Trip over Crooked Water,” Harper’s Weekly, April 7, 1883, reproduced in Mueller, Ocklawaha River Steamboats, 23–26. 39. Quoted in Paul Brooks, Speaking for Nature: How Literary Naturalists from Henry Thoreau to Rachel Carson Shaped America (Boston, 1980), 153. 40. William R. Adams and Carl Shiver, St. Augustine Alligator Farm: A Centennial History (St. Augustine, Fla., 1993). 41. Kirk Monroe, “Catching Alligators,” Harper’s Weekly, 12 April 1884, 233–34, reproduced in McCarthy, Alligator Tales, 68–72. 42. Dick Bothwell, The Great Outdoors Book of Alligators (St. Petersburg, Fla., 1962), lists numerous alligator-related att ractions that were still around by the 1960s. According to Bothwell, the fi rst example was actually the Florida Alligator Farm, established in 1891 (65). Additional information on alligator farms may be found in Breslaur, Roadside Paradise, and at the “Florida Lost Tourist Att ractions” Web site, www.lostparks.com. There were also alligator farms in Los Angeles, California, f. 1907 (“The California Alligator Farm,” www.lincolnheightsla.com /alligator), and in Hot Springs, Arkansas, f. 1902 (“Arkansas Alligator Farm: Farm History,” www.arkansasalligatorfarm.com/aboutus.html). 43. Bothwell, Great Outdoors Book of Alligators, 10–14. According to Patsy West, The Enduring Seminoles: From Alligator Wrestling to Ecotourism (Gainesville, Fla., 1998), 11. Warren Frazee (aka “Alligator Joe”), who opened an alligator farm in Palm Beach in 1895, may have been the fi rst “professional” alligator wrestler. 44. Samuel Proctor and Wright Langley, Gator History: A Pictorial History of the University of Florida (Gainesville, Fla., 1986), 78–79. 45. Iza Duff us Hardy, Oranges and Alligators: Sketches of South Florida Life (London, 1886). 46. The label was used by the Caloosahatchee Valley Growers, of Alva, Florida. 47. The Floridian Brand orange-crate label from the 1940s also featured an alligator crawling over the edge of an oversized orange. 48. On the commodification of nature in America, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983); and Steinberg, Down to Earth. 49. On the early uses of the alligator, see Glasgow, A Social History of the American Alligator, 57–61; and John James Audubon, “Observations on the Natural History of the Alligator,” Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 2 (March 1827): 270–80. 50. The development of the alligator-leather industry is detailed in Glasgow, A

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m a r k v. b a r r o w j r . Social History of the American Alligator, 63–64; Andrews Wilkinson, “The Alligator Hunters of Louisiana,” Century 43.3 (1892): 399–407; and “Leather,” The American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1875), 10: 276–77. 51. Hugh Smith, “Report on the Fisheries of the South Atlantic States,” Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission for 1891 11 (1893): 343–45. On the south Florida alligator trade during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Harry A. Kersey Jr., Pelts, Plumes, and Hides: White Traders among the Seminole Indians, 1870–1930 (Gainesville, Fla., 1975); and Glen Simmons and Laura Ogden, Gladesmen: Gator Hunters, Moonshiners, and Skiffers (Gainesville, Fla., 1998). For additional figures on the alligator trade, see C. H. Stevenson, “Utilization of the Skins of Aquatic Animals,” United States Commission on Fish and Fisheries Report for 1902 (1904): 281–352; and Remington Kellogg, The Habits and Economic Importance of Alligators, United States Department of Agriculture Technical Bulletin no. 146 (Washington, D.C., 1929). 52. The figures that follow are from E. Ross Allen and Wilfred T. Neill, “Increasing Abundance of the Alligator in the Eastern Portion of Its Range,” Herpetologia 5.6 (December 1949): 109–12. 53. Examples are found in Roberts, Florida’s Golden Age, 173–74. 54. Jan H. Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (New York, 1981), 90–98; Loren Coleman, “Alligators-in-theSewers: A Journalistic Origin,” Journal of American Folklore 92 (1979): 335–38; “The Sewergator Sanctuary,” www.sewergator.com. 55. Hugh Smith, “Report on the Fisheries,” 345. 56. Roberts, Florida’s Golden Age, contains hundreds of examples. 57. It remained in business until 1955. For an early Osky’s ad, see George Shaw, Jacksonville Illustrated (Jacksonville, Fla., 1898). See also Roberts, Florida’s Golden Age, 103. 58. Roberts, Florida’s Golden Age, 101. 59. These figures are from Kellogg, Habits and Economic Importance, 19–21. 60. Thomas Barbour, That Vanishing Eden: A Naturalist’s Florida (Boston, 1944), 193. 61. On sportsmen and the early legislation to protect game species, see John F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, 3rd ed. (Corvallis, Ore., 2000); Daniel J. Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination (Washington, D.C., 2001); and James A. Tober, Who Owns the Wildlife?: The Political Economy of Conservation in Nineteenth-Century America (Westport, Ct., 1981). 62. On the history of the Audubon movement, see Frank Graham Jr., The Audubon Ark: A History of the National Audubon Society (New York, 1990); Robin W. Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation: A Study in Nature Protection (Berkeley, Calif., 1975); and Mark V. Barrow Jr., A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology after Audubon (Princeton, N.J., 1998). 63. Glasgow, Social History of the American Alligator, 64. 15 0 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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The Alligator’s Allure 64. Monroe quoted in McCarthy, Alligator Tales, 67. 65. Dimock quoted in ibid., 106. 66. McIlhenny, Alligator’s Life History, 121. 67. Allen and Neill, “Increasing Abundance,” 109–10; C. J. Hylander, Adventures with Reptiles: The Story of Ross Allen (New York, 1951). 68. Glasgow, Social History of the American Alligator, 123–31. 69. Allen and Neill, “Increasing Abundance,” 110. 70. Mark Derr, Some Kind of Paradise: A Chronicle of Man and the Land in Florida (New York, 1989); Jack E. Davis and Raymond Arsenault, eds., Paradise Lost? The Environmental History of Florida (Gainesville, Fla., 2005); Raymond Arsenault, “The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture,” Journal of Southern History 50 (1984): 597–628; Gordon Patterson, The Mosquito Wars: A History of Mosquito Control in Florida (Gainesville, Fla., 2004). 71. Derr, Some Kind of Paradise, 337. 72. Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge, U.K., 1987); Hal K. Rothman, The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States since 1945 (Fort Worth, Tex., 1998). 73. Glasgow, Social History of the American Alligator, 131–32. 74. Steven Lewis Yaffee, Prohibitive Policy: Implementing the Federal Endangered Species Act (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 32–57; Shannon Petersen, Acting for Endangered Species: The Statutory Ark (Lawrence, Kans., 2002), 21–35. 75. Committee on Rare and Endangered Wildlife Species, Rare and Endangered Fish and Wildlife Species (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, 1964). 76. See “78 Species Listed Near Extinction,” New York Times, March 12, 1967. 77. On Carr, his research, and his wildlife-conservation work, see Frederick Rowe Davis, The Man Who Saved Sea Turtles: Archie Carr and the Origins of Conservation Biology (New York, 2007). 78. Archie Carr, “Alligators: Dragons in Distress,” National Geographic 131.1 (January 1967): 133–48. 79. Ibid., 133–34. 80. The activities of the American Alligator Council during its early years are chronicled in the Archie F. Carr Papers, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Library, University of Florida, Gainesville. The quotation is from an undated letter in that collection from William M. Partington to the Florida Audubon Society Alligator Committee Members, box 34, folder 3. See also Huey B. Long, F. Wayne King, and Edward R. Ricciuti, eds., Proceedings of the American Alligator Council, a copy of which is located in the Archie Carr Papers. 81. Yaffee, Prohibited Policy, 42, reports that the provision of the Endangered Species Conservation Act of 1969 extending the Lacey Act to reptiles, amphibians, and some invertebrates was almost entirely in response to illegal traffic in alligator hides. 15 1 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:31:44.

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m a r k v. b a r r o w j r . 82. Some wildlife biologists argue that the alligator was never truly in danger of becoming extinct. See, for example, Thomas A. Lewis, “Searching for Truth in Alligator Country,” National Wildlife (October–November 1987): 14–18; and Thomas C. Hines, “The Past and Future Status of the Alligator in Florida,” Proceedings of the Annual Conference of Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies 33 (1979): 224–32. 83. Allan R. Woodward and Barry L. Cook, “Nuisance-Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) Control in Florida, U.S.A.,” in Crocodiles: Proceedings of the 15th Working Meeting of the Crocodile Specialist Group, IUCN—World Conservation Union, Gland, Switzerland (2000): 446–55. 84. See, for example, Tommy C. Hines and Allan R. Woodward, “Nuisance Alligator Control in Florida,” Wildlife Society Bulletin 8.3 (1980): 234–41. 85. See, for example, Archie Carr to William Partington, November 4, 1971, box 34, Archie Carr Papers; John Dillin, “Gators Recover, and Florida May Reopen Hunting,” Christian Science Monitor, January 31, 1974, 5B; and F. Wayne King, “The American Alligator,” National Parks and Conservation Magazine 46.5 (May 1972): 15–18. 86. Glasgow, Social History of the American Alligator, 139. 87. The various changes in the alligator’s status are recorded in Fish and Wildlife Service, Proposal to Reclassify the American Alligator,” Federal Register 40.131 (8 July 1975): 28712–28714; Fish and Wildlife Service, “Reclassification of the American Alligator to Th reatened Due to Similarity of Appearance throughout the Remainder of Its Range,” Federal Register 52.107 (4 June 1987): 21059–64. 88. Initially the state agency took possession of the hides and conducted an auction to sell them, but beginning in 1988, ownership of the skins and meat was transferred to the trappers immediately upon taking the alligator. Th at same year the state began a lottery system granting private citizens the right to hunt alligators on public property. The changes in the program are chronicled in Woodward and Cook, “Nuisance-Alligator Control in Florida,” 449–50. 89. See Tommy Hines and Richard Scheaffer, “Public Opinion about Alligators in Florida,” Proceedings of the Annual Conference, Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies 31 (1977): 84–89. 90. See, for example, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service brochure entitled American Alligator: Alligator mississippiensis (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1995), which is part of the Endangered Species Success Story series that the agency has begun in order to maintain political support for the Endangered Species Act. The American alligator is one of only a handful of North American species that have been declared “recovered” under the terms of that act. See the listing maintained at the agency’s Web site, www.fws.gov.

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PART III

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Animals in the Service of Society

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Nature Bridled The Treatment and Training of Horses in Early Modern England

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p e t e r e d wa r d s

Th roughout history, man has attempted to dominate his environment and exploit its flora and fauna for his own ends. At fi rst, as a hunter-gatherer, he competed with other animals for food, but he did not begin radically to change the world in which he lived, until he sett led down and began to farm. Cultivation of the soil and the domestication of animals not only helped man to meet his basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter but also added to the ways in which he could exploit his surroundings and his fellow creatures. By the early modern period, man’s demands were much more complex and far more controversial: he chased and killed creatures in the wild merely for pleasure and enslaved and mistreated domesticated animals. Man dominated the natural world to the extent that many inhabitants of Tudor and Stuart England believed that the earth’s resources were completely at their disposal. In literature, with hardly a hint of irony, animals were depicted as complicit in their oppression. As Ben Jonson wrote in “To Penshurst”: “The painted partrich lyes in euery field/and, for thy messe, is willing to be kill’d.”1 Domestication made the job of controlling animals that much easier, but it also raised important ethical questions concerning man’s treatment of them. Within the traditions of Western civilization, this discourse dates from at least classical times and was a matter of concern for early modern thinkers. Indeed, Keith Thomas, in his seminal work Man and the Natural World, sees the early modern period as one of transition, a bridge between the unabashed anthropocentric views of the Middle Ages and the theriophilic-influenced 155

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posturing of the modern world.2 He contends that att itudes toward animals gradually improved over the course of the years 1550–1750, with the pace quickening in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But did these views change actual practice? What Thomas has to say on this point is largely anecdotal or based on literary texts, but what evidence he does cite suggests that abuse continued. Th is essay addresses the link between changing att itudes and actual treatment, focusing on the experience of horses in early modern England as reflected in a wide range of primary sources. I begin with a survey of contemporary philosophical att itudes toward animals, emphasizing the growth of pro-animal sentiment during the period. The impact of these ideals on actual practice is tested against the evidence. Firstly, I have examined early modern manuals of horsemanship and animal husbandry, which do indicate changing att itudes, at least among the writers and perhaps their readers. More problematical is the question whether they reflect actual practice or prescribe what should be done. Secondly, I have looked at legal and other types of records that document the horse trade. These sources provide evidence of what actually happened, though the weight of documentation in muniment rooms skews the analysis toward horses on landed estates. For the population at large, court cases reveal instances of cruelty and misuse. Toll books, recording the sale of horses at markets and fairs, proved particularly illuminating. Paying particular attention to the training and use of horses, I show that their treatment was often a class-based issue. Whereas many gentlemen had a close relationship with the horses they rode, they rarely tended to or managed them. At the outset of a trip, a gentleman or an aristocrat mounted a horse that his groom had led from the stables; when he returned, he left the animal in a servant’s charge. Milords certainly did not steer the plough, drive the coach or cart, or lead pack ponies to market; hence they were free to romanticize about their steeds’ nobility while others did the hard work of breeding, training, and tending to their horses.

Man and the Natural World For Christians, man’s unique position was part of a divine plan. God had created the Garden of Eden as a paradise for humans and had given Adam dominion over all living things. At fi rst, humans and beasts cohabited peacefully; Adam and Eve did not eat meat, and animals were tame. The Fall forever changed that relationship: beasts became wild and aggressive. After the Flood, God reaffi rmed man’s ascendancy, but the world was now a far 15 6

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more dangerous place.3 Aristotle, in the fourth century bc, argued that, as a species, humans were qualitatively different from all other living creatures. While each nonhuman creature had a “soul” (in ascending order of complexity), humans alone possessed a rational soul.4 Th is notion of the hierarchy of souls reemerged in the medieval concept of the “Great Chain of Being,” in which man represents the highest link in the chain. Other qualities deemed to distinguish humans from animals were the power of speech; the practice of religion and the promptings of a conscience; and the ability to exercise free will and moral judgment. As Thomas observes, the issue of man’s superiority was crucial because it validated his exploitation of animals and was used to “justify hunting, domestication, meat-eating, vivisection . . . and the wholesale extermination of vermin and predators.”5 Perhaps the starkest expression of this philosophical premise is Descartes’ concept of the “beast machine,” advanced in 1637 in his Discourse on Method. There he offers an analogy between animals and clocks in an attempt to demonstrate that animals were mere automata, governed by impulse, without souls, and lacking sense and sentiment. Some of his followers went further, arguing that animals did not feel pain.6 Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these ideas came increasingly into question, a development that, at an intellectual level at least, suggests a reappraisal of man’s superiority and with it his domination of the natural world. Some doubted that speech and reason were uniquely human att ributes. More significantly, the idea spread that animals could reason, if in a less complex way than humans. Writing in 1742, at a time when animal intelligence was becoming widely recognized, John Hildrop, rector of Wath in Yorkshire, claimed that animals did have understanding, at least to a degree that enabled them to fulfi ll their role in the natural world. He pointed out that the methods deployed to train horses and dogs worked only because of the animals’ intelligence. Explicitly rejecting the Cartesian beastmachine theory, he observed that had animals been “Creatures that had no Sense, Understanding, or Reflection . . . , this Conduct would be as absurd and ridiculous, as it would be to caress and reward your Clock or your Watch for going well.”7 John Lawrence, writing at the end of the century, argued that horses had a “strong and retentive” memory and shared with humans the ability to reason, differing only in degree.8 Puritans, in particular, railed against cruelty toward animals. Calvin, for instance, pointed out that animals were also God’s creatures and should be treated accordingly. Man might have dominion over the natural world, but he only held it in trust and was obliged to exercise his stewardship with care 15 7

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and consideration. “If a man spare neither his horse, nor his ox nor his ass, therein he betrayeth the wickedness of his nature.”9 On a practical level, too, it mattered: cruelty toward animals led down the slippery slope to the abuse of humans. Moreover, those who thought that animals did have a soul pointed out that as they were capable of achieving salvation, caring for them warranted a higher priority. Among those reformers who argued for animal immortality was Richard Overton, the Leveller and General Baptist, who in his treatise Mans Mortallitie, pointed out the injustice of making salvation available to sinful men but not to sinless animals.10 As a result of the spread of theriophilic thinking, att itudes toward animals did soften. Even so, the question remains whether this trend merely marked a shift in the views of theorists and intellectuals, or if and to what extent it actually affected how animals were treated by their owners or those charged with their care. England may have been a hell for horses in 1557, as the Venetian ambassador declared, but was the same true in 1750?11 Early modern society certainly held horses in high esteem. In 1618, Michael Baret wrote that of all creatures, man alone surpassed the horse; indeed, in terms of its disposition and qualities, he deemed it litt le inferior to humans. His view was echoed by John Worlidge, who remarked in 1675 that the horse “hath the pre-eminence above all others, being the noblest, strongest, swiftest, and most necessary of all the beasts used in this country for the saddle, for the plough and cart, and for the pack.”12 Th is suggests that the horse’s status rested on twin att ributes: its nobility and its usefulness to man. For animals’ human masters, the former served the purpose of the latter. As Worlidge observed, horses were not only necessary and profitable but pleasurable as well.13 People who worked closely with horses similarly rated the animal’s capabilities. The latter naturally formed their own opinion about the intelligence of their charges, especially over the question of whether their horses’ behavior was governed by instinct or by reason. Ironically, their views may have anticipated those of Western theorists. Thus carters, ploughmen, farmers, and the like, even when mistreating them, were well aware that their horses could reason, had a memory, and learned from experience.14

The Treatment of Young Horses Writers on the management of horses stressed the importance of providing young horses with a good start in life, claiming that proper handling affected the animals’ health and strength later on. They therefore discussed at considerable length such matters as when to wean a foal, at what age to cover a fi lly, 15 8

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and how to break in unbacked horses. They also described the best methods for accomplishing these tasks. While these writers naturally disagreed about specific details, in their general approach they displayed a surprising degree of uniformity. Nearly all rejected the brutal practices of the early sixteenth century, advocating care and consideration as the standard and coercion only as a means of last resort. Even William Cavendish, the Earl (and later Duke) of Newcastle, who criticized all earlier writers, was basically in accord with this view. Most agreed that prolonged suckling enhanced the strength and wellbeing of foals, and that early weaning deprived the bones of nourishment essential for proper development. It was also thought to reduce a foal’s life span. In most cases, however, economics rather than concern for a foal’s welfare determined the time of weaning. As Blundeville observed, “here in England they will scant suffer them to sucke six moneths . . . which trulie I cannot recommend.” He advised breeders to allow their young horses, especially colts, to run with their dam for a minimum of one year, if they wanted them to be “strong and healthfull.”15 Ideally, he thought that foals should be allowed to nurse for two years. Cavendish objected to this notion, pointing out that nursing a foal so long reduced a mare’s breeding capacity and produced “heavy, flabby Jades.” Markham recommended that foals nurse for one year, but added that the husbandman who needed his draught mare for the autumn plowing could wean her foal after six months.16 Worlidge, writing more than six decades later and addressing the yeoman farmer, confi rmed Markham’s practical advice with his own recommendation that foals born in spring be weaned in October so that their dams could be used to prepare the ground for the next year’s crop.17 Economics also influenced the time when fi llies were fi rst put to the horse and the rate at which mares produced foals. Writers such as Cavendish and John Halfpenny held that the initial covering should take place in the third year, though the process could be postponed for a further twelve months.18 Markham distinguished between fi ne and ordinary mares on the basis of how often they produced foals, the former being covered every other year, and the latter every year.19 Roger Pratt of Ryston Hall in Norfolk was one who followed this precept, noting in his commonplace book: “yt its best to haue ye Mares horsed . . . but once in two yeares, if theire colts bee intended to bee bred up for fi ne ones.”20 Most gentlemen put their mares to the stallion every year, with only a short interval (a matter of days) between foaling and covering, since the gestation period of eleven months left litt le time for delay. 159

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When deciding on the right age at which to break in their horses, owners had to weigh the benefits of delay against the costs. According to Polydore Vergil, writing in 1511, good horses were scarce in England because of poor treatment early on, being trained when still underage and worked too hard.21 The problem lay in the length of time it took for horses to mature: fi llies were not considered fully grown until five years of age, and colts not until a year later. Before then, as Blundeville notes, their joints had not yet knitted properly; and the process of breaking the animals could injure them. A century later, John Halfpenny put forward the same argument, contrasting late-trained colts, which had well-knit joints and sinews, tough hooves, and good eyesight, with colts broken in at the age of two or three, their eyesight poor, hooves britt le, and backs weak. Morgan agreed, and he also advised waiting until the colt was five years old.22 In practice, the writers observed, fi llies were usually trained at the age of two, and colts at the age of two or three. For Cavendish this was not a problem: fi llies ought to be trained at two so that, when covered a year later, they would not spoil themselves or their foals. As this was not an issue with colts, he recommended delaying a year before breaking them in. Markham pointed out that beyond the age of three the colts became less tractable, and that their “wildness” made the process much more difficult. Baret concurred, maintaining that the practice of late breaking in had produced “many dogged and restiffe Iades.”23 Halfpenny naturally disagreed, claiming that “there was never so sturdy, nor so wilfull a Horse, which would not be tame and easie to handle, with watch and hunger, within one month at the furthest, if his keeper will use diligence.” Topsell adopted an intermediate stance, asserting that colts could be broken in at the age of three but should not be put to work until four.24 Anecdotal evidence from estate papers reveals no common practice and certainly no improvement over time. Sir John Newdigate, of Arbury in Warwickshire, did not break in his colts until after they reached three years of age. His contemporary Sir Thomas Lytt leton did the same. In a 1620 letter to his cousin Fitzwilliam Coningsby thanking him for a colt, Lytt leton wrote that he would “take the colt into the house” at Michaelmas, as he would then be three and a half years old.25 On the royal estates, too, James I’s agents moved the colts from the stud to the stables in their fourth year.26 In 1662, the Earl of Clare was informed by a servant that the keeper of the earl’s horses, Abraham, advised against traveling to London on a particular colt, he “being but now 4 yeares old.” The writer added that although the keeper considered the colt ready for shorter trips, Abraham could not recommend him for a journey to London, as “he is so tender a horse.” By contrast, in the opening years 160

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of the eighteenth century, Nicholas Blundell of Litt le Crosby in Lancashire trained his horses at the age of two, earlier than most.27 A few gentlemen-breeders chose to school their own horses. John Astley was presumably thinking about such men when he wrote of the pleasure to be gained from training a horse in such a way that “he and you be one bodie, of one mind, and of one will.”28 William Cavendish endorsed this opinion and took pride in training his own young horses, viewing it as part of his accomplishment as a horseman. “What can be more comely or pleasing,” he wrote, “than to see . . . so excellent a creature with so much spirit and strength to be so obedient to his rider.”29 Nonetheless, most gentlemen hired a horse rider [trainer], as and when required, emphasizing the distinction between aristocrats, who rode horses as a genteel pursuit, and plebeians, who carried out the mundane task of breaking them in. Some trainers, such as Tim Burbro, who broke in horses for the Cartwrights of Aynho in Northamptonshire, were local farmers and tenants on the gentleman’s estate. In October 1691, Burbro received a deduction of 10 shillings from his [annual] rent for pacing a bay nag belonging to his landlord.30 As a status symbol, leading landowners employed foreign riders, especially from France and Italy, then centers of horsemanship.31 One such man was Hercules Trinchetta, whom Thomas Barnaby recommended to the Earl of Leicester, the queen’s Master of Horse, in 1564. According to Barnaby, Trinchetta had no peer in breaking headstrong horses.32 Prosperous farmers must often have employed trainers to break in their horses, but those of more modest means tended to do the job themselves. Unfortunately, we have few records from such farmers, so it is difficult to assess the extent to which their practices followed (or rather ran parallel to) the advice contained in the animal husbandry manuals. It is possible, however, to extrapolate some of their methods from analyses of extant market and fair toll books, which contain detailed records of all horses traded, including in many cases their ages. My argument follows the rule proposed by Nicholas Morgan in 1609 that horses were deemed to be colts or fi llies until five years of age but never thereafter.33 When reckoned according to this distinction, the data in the toll books suggest that younger horses, identified as full grown, had been broken, and in the case of fi llies classed as mares, covered. Th is evidence should not be pressed too hard, however, as it relies on the chance survival of toll books from fairs held in various parts of the country, and it is by no means certain that sellers (or those recording the transactions) used correct or even consistent nomenclature to distinguish between immature, incompletely broken-in horses and trained adult animals.34 161

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The toll books that I have consulted indicate that most foals were weaned before their fi rst birthday, though these documents also show evidence of some colts running with their dams into their second year. At several fairs, mares were offered for sale with their colts. The books also record the time when colts and fi llies were broken in. Few colts were ridden before their third year, and even then a larger number were backed a year later. A greater proportion of fi llies were broken in when two years old. Breeders might put them to the horse at that age, but in general they waited another year. Gelding, the timing of which was much disputed among the authors of manuals on horsemanship and husbandry, rarely took place before the colts had reached the age of two. It seems clear that very few owners acted on the manuals’ advice to postpone breaking, covering, and gelding their horses until the animals reached full maturity. Indeed, the number of horses listed in the toll books as colts and fi llies drops sharply over the age of three. In terms of change over time, the trend over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was toward accelerating the process of maturation, with breaking in and covering occurring at progressively earlier ages. When training horses, the guiding principle at the beginning of the early modern period was to instill fear in the animal; as a result, cruel methods were the norm. Masters and trainers sought to beat horses into submission and to control them by the use of fierce bits. Horses being trained for the manège, a system of exercises developed in Italy during the early sixteenth century, were punished as harshly as an ordinary nag. Federico Grisone, whose riding school at Naples att racted gentlemen from all over Europe, subjected his horses to a brutal regimen.35 Thomas Blundeville, who translated Grisone’s 1550 treatise on equitation into English ten years after its fi rst publication, characterized such methods as “both dangerous and vnnaturall.”36 Unfortunately, estate and household records are silent on this topic, though valuable insights occasionally emerge from documents concerned with other matters. Notes on a 1621 legal dispute, for example, reveal that Richard Cholmeley of Brandsby employed George Gascoigne to break in his colts at a cost of 3 shillings and 4 pence per horse and then to cure their sore mouths. Gascoigne denied causing the injury, which he claimed was the result of Cholmeley’s servants pulling too hard on the reins.37 The bits used during this early period express much about contemporary att itudes toward horses. They were of two basic sorts: the snaffle and the curb. Snaffle bits acted directly on the animals’ lips, bars and tongue, and although generally milder than the curb bit, could injure a horse’s mouth if applied sharply.38 Thomas Blundeville condemned the common practice of employ162

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ing a severe bit when beginning to break in a young horse. John Astley not only made the same complaint but also criticized the misuse of cavessans and musrolls, items that were supposed to save a horse’s mouth rather than harm its nose and muzzle.39 Because some horses reacted to pain by becoming uncontrollable, these measures often turned out to be counterproductive, prompting Blundeville to declare that they were the cause of so many headstrong horses in England.40 Other horses became dull and unresponsive when subjected to severe bits. To elicit a reaction, callous riders increased the pressure and, as Astley observed, “by those meanes hath so dulled and deaded the senses and feeling, as he [the horse] feeleth litt le of paine, of pleasure nothing at all, and of a sensible creature is made a sensles blocke.”41

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Horses in the Service of Man After their breaking in, horses spent a decade or more in the service of their human masters. How did adult horses fare? Thomas believes that a growing awareness of animal feelings and att ributes did have an effect, as did the widespread belief that, as part of God’s creation, animals deserved respect and fair treatment.42 Thus, Margaret Cavendish distinguished between humans who killed for pleasure and animals that killed merely for food.43 Whether opinion began to shift as a result of advocacy by theriophilic writers such as Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Tryon or occurred because of mere utility is debatable. Indeed, for those unmoved by reason, practical considerations were far more persuasive. While riders’ inhumane treatment of young horses drew the harshest criticism, opponents also condemned the abuse of adult animals. Cruel handling would ruin an economic asset or a status symbol, a matter of growing importance in the early modern period as horses’ economic, social, and cultural value increased. All those who wrote about equine management addressed the need to correct an uncooperative horse and the means to achieve it. Blundeville listed seven ways: voice, tongue, rod, bridle, calves, stirrups, and spurs.44 Markham also discussed the use of the voice, spur, rod, and bridle, indicating that the “gentle” school did not forbid such coercive measures entirely, though its members might disagree on which were acceptable and under what circumstances. Blundeville disagreed with those who would outlaw the rod or cudgel, claiming that one sharp blow between the ears at the fi rst sign of resistance prevented the need for greater violence later. Markham rejected this practice, asserting that it “doe distemper and incertaine the head.”45 To reform a badly trained horse, he prescribed gentleness and patience; and if it 163 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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rebelled, shouts, application of the rod, and “other terror” would show who was master.46 On many occasions, sharp use of the tongue would suffice. Yet in exceptional circumstances a harsh bit might have to be fitted as a temporary expedient. What all authorities on the topic emphasized was the need to employ these methods moderately or as a means of last resort. Referring to punitive bridling, Markham claimed that it corrected many faults but also noted that it should be used “seldome and with great discretion.”47 As ever, William Cavendish disparaged the views of other pundits. In particular, he stated quite clearly that coercion was necessary. A horse, he said, had to know that the rider was the master, and this could be achieved only by instilling fear in the animal and, through fear, love.48 Th is suggests that what Cavendish really wanted to inculcate in the animal was respect rather than fear. While he seldom beat his horses or punished them with rod or spur, he believed that the proper response to resistance was force, “which they obey willingly, for the most part.” Moreover, he did not let the horse’s disposition dictate his actions but rather made it follow his own design. He summed up his approach by declaring that when his horses did well, he cherished them, and when they misbehaved, he punished them.49 In this respect, his method was comparable to that of his fellow writers. They, too, accepted the need to bend a horse to the rider’s will and to punish a recalcitrant animal. Like them, Cavendish rewarded his mounts when they obeyed him. In effect, Cavendish’s bluntness and honesty made him stand apart. Th is, in itself, is an indication that the climate of opinion had changed over the preceding century, at least in the literature. In Henry VIII’s day, brutality was the norm. If in the mid-seventeenth century coercion was still occasionally used to induce obedience, writers chose to focus on the more progressive and caring aspects of horse management. The guidance contained in these manuals was aimed at members of the elite, and it probably had some effect on them. If the upper classes chastised their horses, they seem to have done so sparingly. Nevertheless, while on a journey and anxious to make good progress, either to get home or to reach their lodging for the night, they frequently overtaxed and coerced their mounts. In February 1620/1, for instance, Henry Vavasour’s horse broke down at Hoggesdon, and Vavasour himself was “daylye . . . tiered and dirtied with beating his horse on.”50 Members of the aristocracy were particularly inconsiderate of their horse when engaged in a sporting or recreational activity. Most commonly, abuses occurred while hunting, the favorite pastime of the upper classes. Distracted by the thrill of the chase, riders would spur on their mounts relentlessly. In doing so, Thomas de Gray wrote, they overstrained 164

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their horses, which, though strong at the start of the hunt, were “so toyled out therewith, as that when they [came] home at night, they would pitt y the heart of him who loveth a Horse, to see them so bemired, blouded, spurred, lamentably spent, and tyerd out.”51 Racehorses, although cosseted off the track, also suffered, especially during a tight race. The huge sums wagered on races promoted abuse of the horses, who, according to Thomas Tryon, were by their very nature susceptible to exploitation, being “more easily apt to be forced by their Riders and Drivers.”52 Tryon believed there were many in England who routinely overworked their horses and who beat them whenever the animals appeared “restie.”53 Over a century later, Lawrence strengthened Tryon’s plea for more humane treatment of animals by including a catalogue of abuses committed against horses employed in posting, racing, and pulling carts and coaches.54 Abuses did happen: stubborn horses were whipped, headstrong horses were savagely bridled, and injured horses were allowed no time to recover. The records of the equity courts provide evidence of horses with injuries incurred through neglect.55 Carriers, for instance, overloaded their horses, pushed them too hard on the journey, and denied them adequate rest and sustenance. In a case heard in the Court of Requests in James I’s reign, Richard Snelling, a servant of the London poulterer John Radley, was convicted for causing the death of one horse and seriously injuring another. Returning late (and drunk) from buying poultry at a country market in Potton, Snelling had driven the two heavily laden horses the forty-five miles back to London without rest or provender.56 If people mistreated their own horses, they were even more likely to abuse those belonging to others. Officials and travelers hiring post horses, for instance, were more concerned with reaching their destination than with the welfare of their mounts. In the early sixteenth century, pursuivants were said to “[de]stroye many horses,” and private travelers were no better. Englishmen, it seems, had a reputation for hard riding. According to James Howell, they “ride commonly with that speed, as if they rid for a Midwife, or a Physitian, or to get a pardon to save one’s life, as he goeth to execution.”57 In the late sixteenth century, postmasters on the north road to Berwick complained that their horses were “evilly used,” being overworked because of the amount of traffic on the highway.58 Coachmen similarly abused their animals. For example, the Dutchman William Schellink described a trip he took to Gravesend in July 1661 as follows: He boarded a coach drawn by four “miserable nags,” who despite their “miserably putrid and ulcerated legs” showed “astonishing courage and strength.” The coachmaster went in front while his 165

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servant, Thomas, “drove the four poor creatures, caressing them mercilessly with a whip.”59 The horses, maddened by pain, overturned the coach, which provoked a heated argument between the coachmaster and Thomas, who denied responsibility for the accident. Such incidents were not isolated occurrences; countless other coachmen overtaxed their horses. Servants also routinely mistreated their masters’ horses even though they could be dismissed if their abuses were discovered. In August 1617, Richard Cholmeley of Brandsby wrote in his commonplace book that two of his men had killed one of his mares and seriously injured two other horses “by ryding and chasing.” Cholmeley immediately sacked John Sampson, one of the two servants involved.60 Th is problem is alluded to in a letter to Samuel Hartlib dated March 1657/8 and probably written by John Beale. Extolling the hardiness of asses, the letter-writer observes: “our servants are very cruel but asses bear the injuries which would kill a horse.”61 Even on well-run estates, problems occurred. In September 1722, Isaac Hobart, land steward to the second Earl of Oxford in the early eighteenth century, complained to his master about the behavior of two servants in the stables at Welbeck who had disappeared for days on end and neglected their charges. He dismissed the two but was still seeking a more reliable replacement a year later, when he wrote: “We have much want of a sober careful groom on the spot here, who will stick close to business. Such a one is not to be had in this country.”62 The laboring classes not only mistreated horses belonging to their own masters but also abused horses belonging to other members of the elite. Malcontents, angered by the inequities of a hierarchical society, sometimes took revenge on their “oppressors” by maiming their animals. All kinds of domesticated animals suffered, but horses’ emblematic status made them obvious targets. Associated with authority, they were an ever-present adjunct of the process whereby the elite controlled the lower orders. Th is might take the form of admonishment by a mounted steward on the local estate; a procession of gentlemen riding to the Quarter Sessions; the ceremonial arrival of the assize judges; or a charge by the militia when putt ing down a food riot. The lower classes resented the enclosure and imparking of commons and agricultural land, as well as the reckless disregard of their crops shown by hunting parties. The imposition of savage game laws in the post-Restoration period further inflamed the situation, as did the application of the legal notion of absolute property ownership over the course of the eighteenth century. As lawyers sought to rationalize the legal system by eliminating “the messy complexities of coincident use-right,” people living in the countryside found their traditional rights and customs being eroded. To glean in the mowed 166

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fields, to take loppings and toppings of trees, or to trap small creatures suddenly became a crime. The commoners’ response—whether sending threatening letters, burning barns and ricks, attacking deer and other game, or maiming and killing domesticated animals such as horses and catt le—was, Hay informs us, “among the few free expressions of the labouring poor.”63 Much time, effort, and money was, however, devoted to the treatment of sick or injured horses. Th is may reflect a gradual shift in the intellectual climate toward the suffering of animals but at the same time, owners wanted their charges fit and healthy. An ailing horse could not effectively perform its functions, whether utilitarian, recreational, or iconographic. In 1662, for instance, a nag belonging to Maurice Wynn of Wynnstay Hall suffered a galled back because of an ill-fitt ing saddle and could not be ridden for over three months.64 Gentlemen, wanting to know about equine ailments and remedies for them, could consult the many books on horsemanship, which invariably dealt with the subject and often at great length. Even when they (or their stable keeper) were competent in treating their sick horses, they regularly employed specialists to tend to them. Of these men, farriers were the most skilled. Because the Company of Farriers was a highly exclusive institution, with only forty members in 1674, most of those acting as farriers in the provinces did not belong to this ancient guild. Far more numerous were the horse leeches, whose expertise derived from practical experience rather than formal qualifications.65 Many blacksmiths treated horses, too. Once they had found a competent farrier or leech, gentlemen tended to hire them on a regular basis. In Elizabeth I’s reign, the Pagets of Beaudesert frequently employed George Middleton, and the Petres of Ingatestone Hall gave much work to Henry Pickering.66 Horses in the general population were more vulnerable to an infection because they came into more frequent contact with other animals, often in an inn or livery stable or on a common. Manor courts throughout the country tried to prevent the spread of disease by fi ning owners who put infected horses on the commons, a strategy that met with only partial success. The rolls contain many presentments for the offense. On 21 October 1695, for instance, a manorial jury found Richard Brookes guilty of putt ing a diseased horse onto the aftermath of the town fields at Wellington in Shropshire. The court fi ned him a punitive 10 shillings, an indication of the seriousness with which it viewed the misdemeanor. Th ree years later, the court punished John Archer for grazing a diseased horse on the common and James Taylor for turning a horse “sick of the pocky fashions” into the lanes and common fields of the manor.67 Most nongenteel horse owners in the countryside seem to 167

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have tended to their animals themselves. Even those who could afford to hire a common farrier or a horse leech often chose not to do so, put off by their inflated charges or a lack of faith in their ability. Veterinary knowledge was transmitted in oral reports and through both manuscript and printed sources. In 1636, the anonymous author of The English Farrier, or Country-mans Treasure described his book as containing “approved remedies for all diseases, hurts, maymes, maladies and griefes in Horses,” noting that it would therefore prove a benefit for “Gentlemen, Farmers, In[n]holders, Husbandmen, and generally for all.”68

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Treatment of Old Horses Horses reached their peak at about the age of ten. Writing in 1565, Blundeville observed that “at xiii yeares he beginneth againe to ware vnperfect,” while in 1609 Morgan claimed that horses declined between the ages of ten and fi fteen, and were deemed to be old thereafter. Of course, the length of time that a horse remained of service depended on how it was treated, both when young and as an adult. In 1674, Halfpenny stated that horses, if well managed throughout their lives, could work until the age of twenty-four or twentyfive.69 Evidence in the toll books confi rms these views. Few records of horses over the age of ten appear in the toll books; most of those were eleven to fourteen years old. Apparently many horses, worn out by overwork, did not live as long as they might have done. The fact that a few older horses are listed in the toll books may indicate that some owners treated their animals better than most of their counterparts did theirs. More likely, it reflects the existence of a market for decrepit animals analogous to the trade in used cars today. Kidderminster fair served as one such market. At the turn of the seventeenth century, almost one in seven of the horses whose ages have been recorded fall into the over-ten category. Numbers decline from the age of thirteen, but one horse was said to be thirty years old, and others were described as “full age,” “old,” and “99.”70 What happened when horses could no longer carry out their allotted tasks? Surely, having spent years in man’s service, they deserved an honorable retirement? One or two members of the landed elite, who could afford to allow unproductive animals to utilize economic resources, maintained them on their estate. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Sir Matthew Hale was putt ing his old horses out to graze, while in the early eighteenth century the second Duke of Montagu made Boughton a sanctuary for superannuated horses and cows. However, it would be naïve to believe that this was common 168 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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practice, even among the upper classes. As soon as horses began to cost more than they earned, they generally ended up at the knacker’s yard. Owners did not waste money on superannuated horses, tending to view them in an unsentimental light. Indeed, abuse of aged horses served as a simile for heartless behavior toward old, expendable retainers. A critical portrait of Robert Dudley, fi rst Earl of Leicester, written in about 1584, likens Dudley’s conduct toward his old friends to the treatment of an aged horse, unfit for service, who is either left to graze on a ditch bank or sold for forty pence to a dogmaster.71 In a letter written in February 1597/8, Sir John Holles complained to Lord Sheffield about the behavior of the latter’s groom, who had so neglected a nag left with him by Holles that the animal had died. Holles seems to have cared litt le about the horse’s death, however, which he clearly saw as an opportunity to extract a favor: “But it mattereth not there is but a jade out of the way and I hope for exchange one of these years to have a good breeding mare from you, so as I am very glad of this quarrel.”72 Horses still capable of serving a useful function were in this era viewed differently from those that were not, an inevitable distinction and one that still persists today to a certain extent. Swift has Gulliver make this point when describing to the Houyhnhnms the condition of horses back home in England. He admits that, although gentlemen’s horses were well looked after while fit, they were discarded as soon as they could no longer perform a designated job due to illness or age.73 Many ended up as dog meat for the hounds. As Benjamin Needler, a preacher, remarked in 1655, “better knock him on the head than keep him. . . . His skin, though not worth much, is better worth than the whole beast besides.”74 Daniel Eaton, steward to the third Earl of Cardigan, was equally unsentimental. In a letter to his master dated 3 December 1726, he reported that attempts to cure a mare were proving ineffective and that, as she was suffering from glanders, in addition to being broken winded, she was virtually worthless. He sealed the mare’s fate with the words: “I fear the dogs must have her in a short time.”75

Animal Agency Thus far my essay has examined the ways in which man bent horses to his will, but what of the horses themselves? One or two theriophilic writers of this period, such as Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Tryon, challenged the notion of anthropocentrism by pointing out that all species had a life of their own, independent of human needs.76 Th is is an issue to which revisionists have recently returned. In 1995, for instance, Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel 169

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argued for the need to bring animals back into the account, claiming that a more animal-centered approach could add an extra dimension to the study of the relationship between man and the natural world. Similarly, Erica Fudge has insisted that animals themselves have agency that affects human actions and generates change.77 According to Susan Pearson and Mary Weismantel, animals exert an influence on society by their very presence, as well as by the consideration of their needs and capacities. They, too, insist that animals possess individual agency.78 Manor-court rolls and estate records contain many entries that attest to the historic independence of animals, particularly horses who responded to mistreatment by biting, kicking, or throwing their abuser. They also broke their tethers or barged through gaps in hedges to graze on a neighbor’s corn. On open commons they engaged in unregulated sex. Clearly, these animals did not conform to the standards of behavior expected of them by their human owners, which has led scholars to ask whether such transgressions of human boundaries were purely instinctive, or if animals were perhaps consciously challenging the imposition of such restrictions. For Christopher Philo and Christopher Wilbert, animal resistance is an important question because, if animals are aware of what they are doing, it implies intent, supposedly a uniquely human att ribute.79 The faculty of cognizance was tacitly recognized in the Continental practice of putt ing on trial animals that had attacked humans.80 Although such trials were rare in early modern England, John Evelyn recorded an incident in 1667 in which a horse that had killed a man was baited to death. The same fate befell a savage horse in 1682.81 Ironically, domestication accelerated the acceptance of animal agency because the practice led to the proliferation of nonhumans (plants as well as animals) that cohabited alongside man, thus underscoring the point that no society is ever exclusively human.82 Th is was especially so in early modern England, with its essentially rural economy in which animals far outnumbered humans. Indeed, in the countryside, domesticated animals profoundly influenced the rhythm of daily life through the seasonal cycles of animal gestation, birth, and death. According to Anna Kussmaul, it even influenced the uniquely human activity of marriage, determining the time of the year when farmers and laborers could wed: “Weddings, like other celebrations were infrequent during the months of maximum work and risk; they then clustered in the weeks immediately following the relief from work and risk.”83 In mixed farming areas, marriages peaked in the autumn, whereas in pastoral areas they took place in the spring and early summer after foaling, calving, and lambing had ended, and when laborers had money in their purse. 170

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Nature Bridled

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Conclusion Most people in early modern England believed that man, as God’s supreme creation, deserved dominion over animals. After all, God had given man control over the natural world. Even theriophilic writers based their arguments for better treatment of animals on anthropocentric grounds. Th is is not to say that during the course of the early modern period att itudes toward and treatment of horses did not improve. They did, at least on paper. In published works, theriophilic views became increasingly common, especially after the Restoration in 1660. Practical guides to horse management helped to promote this shift in public opinion and were themselves influenced by more progressive views. The fi rst generation of English writers on horsemanship, reacting against the cruel methods of early-sixteenth-century trainers, emphasized gentle methods while acknowledging that they might, on occasion, have to resort to coercion. These books were influential; gentlemen did study them and presumably learned how to “cherish” their horses. In practice, however, many of the people who actually handled and trained horses did not read these manuals and continued as before. Nor did servants always appreciate the benefits that could accrue from treating their charges with respect. As far as they were concerned, a stubborn horse made their task more difficult, and lacking the time, patience, or inclination to coax the animal, they tended to beat it into submission. For the same reasons, hired horses were often illtreated. Gentlemen, too, were guilty of abusing their horses, especially when hunting or gambling on the outcome of a race. In short, progress was slow, inconsistent, and patchy, and real advances had to wait until much later.

Notes 1. Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst” (1616), lines 29–30, quoted here from Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare among the Animals (Basingstoke, U.K., 2002), 15–17. 2. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1983). Theriophilia can be defi ned as pro-animal sentiment. 3. Ibid., 17, 30. 4. Geoff rey E. Lloyd, Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of His Thought (Cambridge, 1968), 191–92, 239–40. 5. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 41. 6. John Cott ingham, “Descartes’ Treatment of Animals,” in Descartes, by Cottingham, 225–33 (Oxford, 1998). 7. John Hildrop, Free Thought upon the Brute-Creation, or an Examination of Father Bougeant’s Philosophical Amusement &c. (London, 1742), 6–7. 171

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p e t e r e dwa r d s 8. John Lawrence, A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on Horses, and on the Moral Duties of Man towards the Brute Creation (London, 1796), 78, 83. 9. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 154. 10. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke, U.K., 2000), 148–49. See also Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 137–39. 11. Cited in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1975), 308. 12. Michael Baret, An Hipponomie or the Vineyard of Horsemanship (London, 1618), fol. 6; John Worlidge, Systema Agriculturae (London, 1675), 160–61. 13. Worlidge, Systema Agriculturae, 160–61. 14. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 97, 126–27. 15. Thomas Blundeville, The fower chiefyst offices belongyng to horsemanshippe, that is to saye. The office of the breeder, of the rider, of the keper, and of the ferr[i]er. In the firste parte wherof is declared the order of breding of horses. In the seconde howe to breake them, and to make theym horses of seruyce, conteyninge the whole arte of ridynge lately set forth, and nowe newly corrected and amended of manye faultes escaped in the fyrste printynge, as well touchyng the bittes as other wyse. Thirdely howe to dyet them, aswell when they reste as when they trauell by the way. Fourthly to what diseases they be subiecte, together with the causes of such diseases, the sygnes howe to knowe them, and finally howe to cure the same . . . (London, 1565), fols. 17–18, 28r. 16. William Cavendish, A New Method, and Extraordinary Invention, to Dress Horses and Work them according to Nature . . . (London, 1667), 26; Gervase Markham, Cavelarice, or The English horseman: contayning all the arte of horse-manship, as much as is necessary for any man to vnderstand, whether he be horse-breeder, horse-ryder, horse-hunter, horse-runner, horse-ambler, horse-farrier, horse-keeper, coachman, smith, or sadler. . . . Secrets before vnpublished, & now carefully set down for the profit of this whole nation (London, 1607), 55. 17. Worlidge, Systema Agriculturae, 284. 18. W. Cavendish, A New Method, 95; J[ohn] H[alfpenny] et al., The Gentleman’s Jockey and Approved Farrier, 9th ed. (London, 1704), 80. 19. Markham, Cavelarice, 55; Gervase Markham, Markhams Maister-Peece (London, 1615), 222. 20. Microfi lm reel 219/1, Pratt of Ryston MSS, Norfolk Record Office. 21. Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, ed. Rawdon Brown et al., 38 vols. (London, 1864–1947), 2:51, no. 129; W. Cavendish, A New Method, 94–95. 22. Markham, Cavelarice, 60; Blundeville, The fower chiefyst offices, fol. 15; Nicholas Morgan, The Perfection of Horse-Manship (London, 1609), 98; Halfpenny et al., The Gentleman’s Jockey, 101. 23. W. Cavendish, A New Method, 94–95; Markham, Cavelarice, 73–74. See also Halfpenny et al., The Gentleman’s Jockey, 92; Blundeville, The fower chiefyst offices, fol. 29v; and Baret, An Hipponomie, 48–49. 172 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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Nature Bridled 24. Halfpenny, The Gentleman’s Jockey, 99; Edward Topsell, The Historie of FoureFooted Beastes (London, 1607), 302. 25. CR 136/B/1024, Newdigate MSS, Warwickshire Record Office; W15/21, Coningsby MSS, Herefordshire Record Office. I am grateful to Julian Tonks for this reference. 26. E 101/533/14, [Equitium Regis Accounts], National Archives of the United Kingdom (hereafter TNA). 27. Walter to the Earl of Clare at Clare House, Drury Lane, 2 August 1662, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, MSS Dept., Nott ingham University Library; Margaret Blundell, ed., Blundell’s Diary and Letter Book 1702–1728 (Liverpool, 1952), 124. 28. John Astley, The Art of Riding (London, 1584), 56–57. 29. W. Cavendish, A New Method, 13. 30. C[A] 3489, Cartwright of Aynho MSS, Northamptonshire Record Office. 31. Marcia Vale, The Gentleman’s Recreations: Accomplishments and Pastimes of the English Gentleman 1580–1630 (Cambridge, U.K., 1977), 23–24; Joan Th irsk, Horses in Early Modern England: For Service, for Pleasure, for Power (Reading, U.K., 1978), 17, 19. 32. Report on the Pepys Manuscripts, preserved at Magdalene College, Cambridge, Historical Manuscripts Commission (hereafter HMC), ed. E. K. Purnell (London, 1911), 18. 33. Morgan, The Perfection of Horse-Manship, 98; Markham, Caverlarice, 51. 34. See Roger Longrigg, The English Squire and His Sport (London, 1977), 57. 35. Peter Edwards, Horse and Man in Early Modern England (Cambridge, U.K., 2007), 50. 36. Thomas Blundeville, The Arte of Rydynge (London [1560]), fols. 9v–10r. The Italian title of Grisone’s treatise is Gli ordini di cavalcare. 37. The Notebook of Richard Cholmeley of Brandsby, c. 1600–1623, North Yorkshire Record Office Publications, no. 44 (1988): 221. 38. Ann Hyland, The Horse in the Middle Ages (Gloucestershire, U.K., 1999), 64. 39. Blundeville, Rydynge, fol. 9v–10; Astley, The Art of Riding, 6. 40. Hyland, The Horse in the Middle Ages, 65; Blundeville, Rydynge, fol. 9v; see also Hyland, The Horse in the Middle Ages, 65. 41. Astley, The Art of Riding, 6–7. 42. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 170. 43. Margaret Cavendish, Political Writings (Cambridge, U.K. 2003), 64. 44. Blundeville, Rydynge, fol. 7 v. 45. Ibid., fol. 9; Markham, Cavelarice, 46. 46. Gervase Markham, The Perfect Horseman (London, 1655), 18. 47. Astley, The Art of Riding, 6; Gervase Markham, Covntrey Contentments, in two bookes: the first, containing the whole art of riding great horses in very short time, with the breeding, breaking, dyeting and ordring of them, and of running, hunting and ambling horses, with the manner how to vse them in their trauell. . . . A worke very profitable and necessary for the generall good of this kingdome (London, 1615), 41. 173 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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p e t e r e dwa r d s 48. W. Cavendish, A New Method, 196. 49. Ibid., 42–43. 50. Cholmeley, Notebook, 216. 51. Thomas de Gray, The Compleat Horseman and Expert Ferrier in two bookes. The first, shewing the best manner of breeding good horses, with their choyce, nature, riding and dyeting . . . The second, directing the most exact and approved manner how to know and cure all maladies and diseases in horses . . . (London, 1639), bk. 1, sig. C2v. 52. Thomas Tryon, The Country-Mans Companion (London, ca. 1683), 2–3. 53. Ibid., 3; Thomas Bedingfield, The Art of Riding (London, 1586), 96–98. 54. Lawrence, A Philosophical and Practical Treatise, bk. 1, 144–50. 55. See, for example, two documents in Britain’s National Archives: Requests 2/157/163, 2/162/16, 2/396/80; and Chancery C1/1009/58, C23/141/98. 56. See, for example, TNA Requests 2/308/1, which asserts that one horse was loaded with 250 pounds and the other with 200 pounds. 57. William Horman, Vulgaria (London, 1530), fol. 248v; 103; James Howell, Instructions for Forreine Travell, shewing by what cours, and in what compasse of time, one may take an exact survey of the kingdomes and states of christendome, and arrive to the practicall knowledge of the languages, to good purpose (London, 1642), 194. 58. Howard Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (Princeton, N.J., 1948), 13–14. 59. Maurice Exwood and Hartmut L. Lehmann, eds., “The Journal of William Schellink’s Travels in England 1661–1663,” Camden Society, 5th ser., 1 (1993): 32–33. 60. Cholmeley, Notebook, 142. 61. Hartlib MSS 31/1/64–65, Sheffield University Library. 62. Add. MS 70385, fols. 37, 40, 77, British Library (hereafter BL). 63. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 184; Edward P. Thompson, Whigs & Hunters (Harmondsworth, 1977), 241, 246; P. B. Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws 1671–1831 (Cambridge, U.K. 1981), 5, 20; Keith D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660–1900 (Cambridge, U.K. 1987), 174–80; Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1975), 252–53. 64. Brian E. Howells, ed., “A Calendar of Letters Relating to North Wales 1533–c. 1700,” Board of Celtic Studies 23 (Cardiff, 1967), esp. 202. 65. See Louise Curth, “Seventeenth-Century English Almanacs: Transmitters of Advice for Sick Animals,” in Cultural Approaches to the History of Medicine: Mediating Medicine in Early Modern and Modern Europe, ed. Willem de Blécourt and Cornelie Usborne (Basingstoke, U.K., 2004), 65–66; and Louise Curth, “The Care of the Brute Beast: Animals and the Seventeenth-Century Medical Market-place,” Social History of Medicine 15.3 (2002): 375–92, esp. 383, 385. 66. D[W] 1734/3/3/276, 279, Paget MSS, Staffordshire Record Office; Arthur C. Edwards, John Petre 1549–1613 (London, 1975), 66.

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Nature Bridled 67. 1224/Box 205, Forester MSS, Shropshire Record Office, Wellington Manor Court Book, 1690–1704. 68. Curth, “The Care of the Brute Beast,” 383, 387–88; Anonymous, The English Farrier, or Country-mans Treasure (London, 1636), title page. 69. Blundeville, The fower chiefyst offices, fol. 15; Morgan, The Perfection of HorseManship, 98; Halfpenny et al., The Gentleman’s Jockey, 101. 70. Edwards, Horse and Man, 58–59. 71. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 190; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Addenda (1580–1625), ed. M. A. E. Green (London, 1872), 138. 72. HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Portland IX, ed. R. F. Isaacson (London, 1923), 62. 73. R. A. Greenberg, ed., Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (New York, 1970), 208. 74. The preacher’s name—Benjamin Needler—is given at the beginning of the sentence. Quoted here from Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 100. 75. The Letters of Daniel Eaton to the Third Earl of Cardigan 1725–1732, ed. Joan Wake and Deborah C. Webster (Northampton, U.K., 1971), 82n. 76. M. Cavendish, Political Writings, 64; Tryon, The Country-Mans Companion, 171. 77. See Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel, “Bringing the Animals Back In,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (1995): 632–36; and Erica Fudge, introduction to Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Fudge, (Urbana, 2004), 3. 78. See Susan Pearson and Mary Weismantel, “Does ‘The Animal’ Exist? Toward a Theory of Social Life with Animals,” in this volume. 79. Christopher Philo and Christopher Wilbert, eds., Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations (London, 2000), 15. 80. E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials (London, 1906). 81. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Esmond S. De Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1955), 3:491–92, cited in Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 98. 82. Philo and Wilbert, eds., Animal Spaces, 17. 83. Ann Kussmaul, A General View of the Rural Economy of England, 1538–1840 (Cambridge, 1990), 3–4.

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The Public and Private Lives of “First Dogs” Warren G. Harding’s Laddie Boy and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fala

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h e l ena pycior

From the early twentieth century, the dogs of American presidents have enjoyed a special status. The iconic standing of the wives and families of the presidents as “fi rst ladies” and “fi rst families” has been extended to the “fi rst dogs.” Ranking high in the pantheon of fi rst dogs are President Warren G. Harding’s Laddie Boy, who was the fi rst of the modern fi rst dogs, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fala, arguably the most revered of the fi rst dogs. Th is essay aims, fi rst, to introduce Laddie Boy and Fala as legitimate biographical subjects and, secondly, to deepen the historical understanding of the fi rst dog as a cultural construct. Methodological reflections are followed by a brief introduction to the lives of Laddie Boy and Fala. Some comparison and contrast highlight the dogs’ distinct life histories. The paper then sketches two case studies: Laddie Boy’s service as the “host” of the 1923 Easter egg roll at the White House and Fala’s emergence in 1944 as “an election year personality.” These studies begin to capture the complex, interconnected public and private lives of the fi rst dogs. The paper thus demonstrates that rich historical sources on Laddie Boy and Fala—written by their close human companions and many other observers of the dogs—make serious biography possible. In talking about these fi rst dogs, Americans ignored what Bernard Rollin has called the “common sense of science,”1 including scientists’ strictures against “att ributions of psychological states to animals.” Members of the fi rst families, their friends, the press, and the public saw Laddie Boy and 176

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The Public and Private Lives of “First Dogs”

Fala as expressing emotions, evidencing preferences, and having individual personalities.2 In developing portraits of the dogs, their human contemporaries relied heavily on anecdotes—“individual instances of behavior in context”—which typically were reported in detail, often by multiple observers, and interpreted with noticeable restraint. Of interest to historians of humananimal relations, Laddie Boy and Fala were thus mediums for public, indeed national, sanctioning of the “ordinary common sense” approach to animal behavior over the “common sense of science.” Of particular interest to scholars exploring animal biography, careful readings of Laddie Boy’s and Fala’s emotional states are part and parcel of the records on the dogs left behind by their human contemporaries.

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Brief Argument for “Canine Biography” A contribution to the history of American presidents, White House history, and the history of human-animal relations, this essay is also an exercise in a particular form of biography, which I am calling “canine biography.” Th is is historical biography with a canine rather than human subject. Pushing the boundaries of biography to include nonhuman subjects is not a new idea. In 1933, Virginia Woolf published a book on Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. Although Flush: A Biography is not a historical biography, the book combines the facts of Flush’s life with fictionalized elements. The facts conform to what, in an essay of 1927, Woolf called the “granite” of biography, while the fiction is the “rainbow” that she felt was so effective in helping biographers to reconstruct personality.3 The granite of Flush (including Flush’s attacks on Robert Browning in 1846, as documented by the Brownings) was the product of historical research, which took Woolf through at least ten volumes of published letters.4 In Polaris: The Story of an Eskimo Dog, published a decade before Flush, Ernest Harold Baynes came closer than Woolf to attempting historical biography of a dog. Baynes condemned earlier “oversentimental” animal stories and promised his readers instead a life of a dog based on actual incidents, with “almost every one . . . recounted exactly as it occurred.” Baynes, who had lived with and closely observed Polaris (the offspring of two dogs who in 1909 made the trek to the North Pole with Admiral Robert E. Peary), admitted to “shading” only one or two of the incidents he recounted. The book’s dedication to Dr. Townsend W. Thorndike, moreover, suggested that Baynes had followed the latter’s suggestion that he write a biography, “the biography of our mutual friend, Polaris the Glorious.”5 Although Flush and Polaris offer glimmers of historical canine biography, 17 7 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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this genre seems more consonant with the late twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries than with Woolf and Baynes’s period. Over the course of the twentieth century, the circle of subjects for biography widened to the point where nonhuman animals can perhaps be allowed a place at least on its periphery. World War I marked a watershed in the history of biography within English literature as the genre increasingly embraced “ordinary people” caught up in war, “involved in but far removed from the decision-making of political events.”6 Not coincidentally, although dogs who had served in World War I were collectively remembered through monuments to “The War Dog,” a few of these dogs enjoyed individual celebrity, leading to interest in documenting their military service.7 Before he published Polaris, Baynes wrote about the dogs of World War I; eschewing fictional accounts of these dogs, he tried to document “the splendid work they actually did.”8 In 1939, Woolf herself asked if the time had not come for biographers to move beyond the “great men”: “Is not anyone who has lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of biography—the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious?”9 Woolf did not here call for biography of animals. By the end of the twentieth century, however, modern interdisciplinary scholarship on nonhuman animals—which has increasingly argued for appreciation of their emotional and mental states—suggested that animals could be worthy biographical subjects. “Though animals do not write autobiographies, as we understand them,” Jeff rey Masson and Susan McCarthy challenged in 1995, “their biographies can be written. They are individuals and members of groups, with elaborate histories that take place in a concrete world, and involve a large number of complex emotional states.”10 Jane Goodall, Stephen Jay Gould, Tom Regan, and Kenneth Shapiro have all in theory or practice endorsed some form of animal biography or (Gould’s expression) “stories about individual [nonhuman] creatures.”11 A serious biographical approach to Fala, specifically, is not entirely novel. Margaret Suckley—who had given Fala to President Roosevelt—was a pioneering canine biographer. In 1942, she and Alice Dalgliesh published The True Story of Fala.12 Suckley had begun this project alone a year earlier, when she announced to Roosevelt that she was working on “a ‘true story of Fala.’”13 Suckley aimed largely at fact rather than fiction, and the book she fi nally published with Dalgliesh resembled juvenile biography, with the twist of a canine subject. Suckley and Dalgliesh gave their readers “straight facts,” a contemporary reviewer enthused, and they did not try “to ‘make a story’ out of the pleasant doings of a treasured dog.”14 Nevertheless, The True Story of Fala had some of the trappings of less than serious biography. The testimonial to 178

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The Public and Private Lives of “First Dogs”

the book’s accuracy came from Fala, whose “paw mark” appeared on one of the book’s early pages with a fi rst-person notation that he was sanctioning it as a “true story.” Th is cute endorsement, combined with the book’s publication as children’s literature, seemed to speak to an American society that was eager to read the life of a fi rst dog but perhaps not ready to purchase that life as adult literature or to classify it as biography. Still, The True Story of Fala was constructed mostly of granite, and it earned Suckley a description in the New York Times as Fala’s “official biographer.”15 My aim here (and in my larger project on the history of the fi rst dogs and fi rst cats of the United States) is to study the fi rst dogs as historical subjects. There seems to be no compelling objection to trying to apply what James Clifford defi nes as “scholarly-historical” biography to canine subjects. In this particular type of biography, “there is always some selection of evidence, but no unacknowledged guesswork, no fictional devices, and no attempts to interpret the subject’s personality and actions psychologically.”16 Similarly, historians can be challenged to pursue Leon Edel’s “figure in the carpet” across species lines even while eschewing the hunt for the “figure under the carpet” (or the “private mythology of the individual”).17 The assumption that the standards and goals of human biography can, to a degree, be translated to canine subjects does not mean that every dog’s life history will be transformed into a scholarly biography. Historical importance, popularity, representation of difference,18 commemorative interests, didactic value, and availability of sources help to determine the human subjects of biography. The weighing of all these factors, especially sources, will limit canine biography. Canine biographers cannot depend on traditional primary sources—unmediated statements coming from their subjects, such as what President Harding actually wrote or said. Still, biography uses a wide range of other historical materials, and the quantity and quality of those materials matter. Here biographers of the American fi rst dogs have an edge, for no group of dogs seems better documented. Photographs, newsreels, and/or fi lms captured Laddie Boy and Fala in action. There are ample written records on the dogs. The presidents, other human members of the fi rst families, friends, government officials, White House staff, and the press documented the dogs’ lives. The anecdotal nature of much of the evidence does not rule out biography. Although controversy surrounds the use of anecdotes in the scientific study of animal behavior, anecdotes have long been staples of human biography. When Clifford interviewed “serious-minded historians” known for their biographical work, they often spoke about anecdotes. Questioned about their selection of evidence, these biographers typically responded: “Here was a 179

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revealing anecdote, which obviously had to be included since it showed so much about the subject’s character.”19 There are nearly overwhelming primary and secondary sources on Harding and especially Roosevelt, which make dual biography of president and dog not only possible but also difficult to move beyond. Any biography of a fi rst dog is to some extent dual (or even group) biography, and as such can turn into an important case study in the history of human-dog relations. The argument for canine biography, then, should not be interpreted as a rejection of dual biography. Experimentation with canine biography comes partially out of fear of losing the animal subject amidst a cast of towering humans. Dogs’ lives are not exclusively about relationships with humans. For example, Laddie Boy chased sheep from the White House lawn and Fala romped through the woods alone and with his dog friends—observations of course reported by their human observers.20 Th is essay pursues the intertwined public and private lives of Laddie Boy and Fala. A “private” life means minimally a life sequestered from public observation and, for fi rst dogs and presidents, that small part of life lived outside the White House spotlight. The essay, moreover, respects the assumption that the fi rst dogs had emotional lives, akin to but not necessarily the same as human emotional lives. Rejection of this assumption would put the canine biographer at odds with the fi rst families and other contemporaries who recorded the lives of Laddie Boy and Fala. “Most ordinary people who have direct contact with animals,” Masson and McCarthy argue in their popular When Elephants Weep, “freely concede the reality of animal emotions. Their belief arises from the evidence of their senses and logical deduction.” Masson and McCarthy furthermore write that people who live with nonhuman animals develop by experience “quite realistic views about their pets’ abilities and att ributes.” Th is “realistic view” protects them against such “anthropomorphic error or projection” as the statement that their dog is upset because they have failed to celebrate the dog’s birthday, while permitt ing them to frame such “useful” statements as their dog “feels left out and wants . . . attention.”21 Although reckless anthropomorphism certainly runs through some sources on Laddie Boy and Fala, many who documented these dogs seem to have been guided by a realistic view of animal emotions, similar to that sketched by Masson and McCarthy and to Rollins’s “ordinary common sense” approach. Indeed, fi rst families, friends, dog caretakers, newspaper reporters, and other observers of Laddie Boy and Fala reached the same kinds of conclusions about the fi rst dogs as did those modern dog owners studied and documented by Clinton Sanders—that is, that the dogs had “minds, 180

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The Public and Private Lives of “First Dogs”

emotional lives, unique personalities, and readily identifiable tastes.”22 There are, then, ample biographical materials on Laddie Boy and Fala, written from multiple standpoints, dealing with the dogs’ public and more private lives, and engaging in realistic readings of the dogs’ emotions and (to a lesser extent) mental states. Canine biography, then, challenges the historian to become absorbed with the real dog lying on the carpet and to pursue him through a bramble of human observations and constructions. A genre in itself, canine biography also offers great promise as a step toward dual or group biography of dogs of the past and their human companions. Among human-animal relationships, none is perhaps more intense than that between pet and human companion. Historical understanding of the evolution of pet keeping and of the humananimal bond demands case studies as well as attention to the prescriptive and representational literature of pet keeping. Canine biography may show historians ways of putt ing a litt le more of the dog into our otherwise onesided, anthropocentric portraits of human-dog pairs. To the extent that pets “are creatures of their owner’s way of life,”23 canine biography may deepen human biography as well.

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The Lives of Laddie Boy and Fala: An Introduction Although there were major differences in their public and private lives, Laddie Boy—an Airedale terrier born on 28 July 1920—and Fala—a Scott ish terrier born on 7 April 1940—shared important characteristics and life experiences. Both were pedigreed terriers, males, and gift s to presidents from friends. Marshall Sheppey, one of Harding’s friends from Toledo, Ohio, sent Laddie Boy to the White House at the age of seven months and apparently with some puppy training. Fala (about whom much more is known) came to the White House as a gift to President Roosevelt from Margaret Suckley. As supported by her journals and correspondence with Roosevelt (which were discovered upon her death in the early 1990s), Suckley was “Roosevelt’s closest companion during the last years of his life.”24 A sixth cousin of the president, Suckley had maintained an active correspondence with him from 1933, and in fall 1941 was appointed a junior archivist at the newly opened Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York. Her multiple roles as cousin, Dutchess County neighbor, Fala’s on-and-off caretaker, and archivist provided effective cover for the close relationship that she and Roosevelt enjoyed until the president’s death on 12 April 1945. When Suckley acquired Fala in July 1940, she saw him as “a puppy . . . 181 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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[who] had to be trained before he was ready to live in the White House.” From July into November, Fala prepared for the kind of life that he would fi nd at the president’s side in Hyde Park and in Washington, D.C. During this period, Fala and Suckley spent three weeks in New York City, where the dog learned to walk gracefully on a leash through crowds of people. Under Suckley’s tutelage, Fala also mastered a set of basic tricks that he would perform for the rest of his life at the beckoning of the president and eventually Eleanor Roosevelt. On command he gave his paw, spoke (but only “quietly” because—Suckley reasoned—a dog should not bark too much or too loudly in the White House), rolled over, lay down, and jumped.25 Having stayed a night with the president at Hyde Park in August, Fala moved permanently into the White House on 10 November. Th ree other dogs had already shared the White House with the Roosevelts. Public biting attacks had resulted in quick relocation of two of these dogs, Major and Meggie; the third dog, Winks, had died prematurely while running on the White House lawn. Laddie Boy, in fact, briefly shared his home

“Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fala and Ruthie Bie at Hill Top Cottage in Hyde Park, N.Y.,” 1941. (Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives)

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The Public and Private Lives of “First Dogs”

with Oh Boy, a bulldog who proved unable to meet White House expectations.26 Laddie Boy and Fala, on the other hand, thrived as fi rst dogs. A combination of personality and training helped them to adapt to the busyness of the White House and to complicated webs of masters, guardians, caretakers, and onlookers. At the very beginning of his presidency, Harding created the unofficial post of “master of hounds,” to which he appointed Wilson Jackson, an African American who served as a White House messenger.27 Jackson worked primarily behind the scenes to feed, walk, and train Laddie Boy. He sometimes showed the dog to the public and cared for him when he was left at the White House during lengthy presidential trips. Thus Laddie Boy had one very public master (the president), two guardians (Warren and Florence Harding), and a White House “master of the hounds,” or caretaker. Fala proved his sociability and resilience by thriving amidst even more complicated social relationships. He had a presidential master who could not walk on his own but traveled frequently. In the White House and on boat, car, and train trips, Fala had to make a place for himself as a member of Roosevelt’s varying entourages, which ranged from a few close friends to large groups dominated by American servicemen. In his everyday life, Fala established relationships with two guardians (Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt), a large extended family consisting of the Roosevelts’ adult children and grandchildren, and an assortment of caretakers, including the president’s valets, bodyguard, and Margaret Suckley. Suckley, moreover, was never simply one of Fala’s caretakers. She was his original master and trainer, sometime handler, and (as discussed above) biographer. Even these roles did not capture the relationships linking Fala and Suckley. In public, Fala became the Roosevelts’ family dog; in private, he belonged to a trio of close companions made up of himself, the president, and Suckley. For Fala, there were many days like 25 February 1944, when Roosevelt—distancing himself from political controversy in Washington—relaxed by driving Suckley and Fala through the woods of Hyde Park, with the Secret Service following his car.28 There were also hours spent at Hill Top Cottage, the president’s retreat in Hyde Park, where the trio relaxed in relative privacy. Indeed, on one of these occasions, Suckley took a rare photograph that caught Roosevelt sitt ing in a wheelchair. Fala is on the president’s lap; Ruthie Bie, the granddaughter of the cottage’s caretaker, is standing next to him; and Suckley is invisible on the other side of the camera’s lens. Laddie Boy was a peacetime fi rst dog, whereas Fala lived in the White House during World War II. Laddie Boy, as a frolicking family pet, helped to symbolize the “return to normalcy” that in 1920 Harding had promised to a 183

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war-weary American public. He ran around the White House lawn, carried newspapers to his master, and often jumped up on a smiling president. Like Harding, he acquired a reputation for affability; dog and master were known for their willingness to shake hands with the public. In mid-October 1921, the president shook the hands of almost two hundred members of the National Council of Catholic Women gathered in his office at the White House. As Jean Eliot of the Washington Times observed, Laddie Boy added a homey touch to the event “by pouncing in and out of the . . . office and offering his paw to many of the enthusiastic women.”29 At the Easter egg rolls held on the White House lawn, Laddie Boy greeted and played with throngs of children. Laddie Boy was also a celebrity dog. As the American public turned from wartime concerns to social issues, the animal welfare movement—in collaboration with the Hardings—used Laddie Boy to bolster its cause. Laddie Boy, riding on a float of his own, led the “Be Kind to Animals” parade that the Humane Education Society held in Washington, D.C., in May 1921. The Hardings, then, seem to have fostered Laddie Boy as the third member of the fi rst family and a canine celebrity in his own right, not simply for political purposes but also (as argued in an earlier paper) to further animal welfare.30 Fala came to the White House soon after Roosevelt had been elected to an unprecedented third term as president of the United States and a year before the country formally entered World War II. During the grave period leading up to and through the participation of the United States in the war, Fala was Roosevelt’s “friend and constant companion,” a dog who slept on a carpet in the president’s bedroom night after night.31 Fala served, moreover, as an unofficial war dog.32 Whereas Harding used Laddie Boy to bolster animal welfare, Roosevelt enrolled Fala in wartime causes. Before the United States entered World War II, Fala assumed the presidency of Barkers for Britain; later he was enlisted as a private in the Dogs for Defense Reserve. Fala’s participation in these two organizations was largely symbolic, requiring a photograph here or there and not the kind of taxing public appearances that Laddie Boy had made. Founded in 1940, Bundles for Britain was originally a private American relief organization that sent aid to British war victims. Although average Americans (and eventually people from other countries as well) participated in Bundles for Britain, the organization used celebrities, especially women, to assure broad media coverage of its aims and activities.33 In 1941 the organization set up Barkers for Britain, a fund-raising arm that solicited cash donations from dog keepers. As publicity for Bundles for Britain centered on women celebrities, Fala was the national president and public face of Barkers for Britain.34 184

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Whereas the peaceful 1920s spawned celebrities, World War II turned men, women, and dogs into major historical figures. Roosevelt and Suckley together took actions, some calculated, that helped to lead to Fala’s recognition by 1944 as “an election year personality” and a “personage.”35 The president took Fala on the arduous North Atlantic trip that led to his and Winston Churchill’s signing of the Atlantic Charter in August 1941. As Roosevelt, Churchill, and their staffs posed on the USS Augusta for photographs of the historic meeting, the president’s eyes fell on Fala, who seemed to be “wandering sadly” on the ship’s deck. A call from the president brought Fala to his master’s feet, into the official photographs, and (as Suckley and Dalgliesh observed) into “history books.”36 Even before the Atlantic Conference, however, Roosevelt and especially Suckley seemed determined to assure Fala’s place in history. Fala had been Roosevelt’s dog less than a year when, in May 1941, Suckley casually wrote the president about her proposed “true story of Fala.” She indicated that she was aiming at a children’s story, which she would try to publish if it turned out “interesting” enough.37 Among the factors leading up to the biography of Fala was the deep interest in history shared by Suckley and Roosevelt, who had majored in history at Harvard. Th is was history motivated by the desire to preserve the memory of the president, his family, home, Dutchess County neighbors,38 and even dog. As Suckley worked on her biography of Fala, she informally helped with preparations for the dedication and opening of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library on 30 June. In an early June letter to the president, she referred to the library’s “Fala Exhibit,” which was to include at a minimum Fala’s dog license tag and his “Barkers for Britain” medal.39 Whereas Laddie Boy—a fi rst dog of the peaceful and Roaring Twenties—was a celebrity akin to the fi lm dogs of his period, Fala—the fi rst dog of a nation moving toward and then through World War II and the dog of a president with a strong interest in history and commemoration—was recognized in his lifetime as a historic figure. Prior to the Atlantic Conference, moreover, Fala on his own had grabbed the public spotlight. On inauguration day, 20 January 1941, Fala’s disobedience showcased him as an individual. As documented by the reporters surrounding the president, Fala had escaped from the White House as the fi rst family prepared to leave for the inauguration and had jumped into the back seat of the car that awaited the president. Once the president was in the car, photographers captured the interaction between him and his dog. In The True Story of Fala, a four-page spread of photographs on the dog’s inaugural escapade overshadowed the photograph of him at the Atlantic Conference. In the fi rst photograph Roosevelt—who could not enter or exit the car on his own, 185

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let alone lift Fala out of the car and onto the ground—was talking to Fala and trying to persuade him to leave. The second and third photographs caught Tommy Qualters, the president’s bodyguard, approaching Fala and then removing him from the car, while the fourth featured a smiling, perhaps laughing Roosevelt now sitt ing in the car’s back seat with two men. As stressed by Suckley and Dalgliesh, the photographs told “exactly what happened,” and newspapers around the country carried both the story of Fala’s escapade and one or more of the photographs.40 In the second photograph, the gazes of Roosevelt and Qualters lead viewers directly to Fala, or, more precisely, the left side of Fala’s black head, with its mesmerizing eye that seems to invite a reading of the dog’s feelings at that moment. Incorporating the event into his inauguration coverage for the New York Times, Meyer Berger wrote of a smiling president who had enjoyed being temporarily distracted from the weighty issues of the day and a dog who had appeared “sad-eyed and wistful” as he was evicted from the car.41 During Fala’s fi rst year in the White House, then, Suckley, Roosevelt, and Fala himself promoted the dog’s public recognition as a distinct member of the fi rst family, a standing Fala would enjoy through Roosevelt’s death in early 1945. Although both Laddie Boy and Fala lost their masters while they were still in office, the circumstances of the presidents’ deaths and the subsequent disposition of the dogs shed light on their quite different private lives. The Harding presidency ran only from March 1921 to August 1923. Elected president an unprecedented four times, Roosevelt died just three months into his fourth term. Both presidents died away from the White House: Harding in San Francisco, California, and Roosevelt in Warm Springs, Georgia. Laddie Boy did not regularly accompany the Hardings on their major trips outside Washington, and he was not with the couple when the president died. Fala, on the other hand, was Roosevelt’s constant companion in image and reality. Fala and three of the president’s close women friends (Suckley, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, and Laura Delano)—but not Eleanor Roosevelt—were at Warm Springs on 12 April 1945. Following the death of his master, Laddie Boy ended up a disposable pet sent to a second home, whereas Fala became the subject of a quiet custody struggle. After President Harding’s death, Laddie Boy became restless. Reported to have found the dog’s behavior upsett ing, Florence Harding quickly gave him to Harry Barker, the Secret Service agent who had been assigned to her at the White House and with whom she had seemed to develop a motherson relationship.42 Laddie Boy lived with the extended Barker family in Newton, Massachusetts, until his death on 22 January 1929. American newspapers 186

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documented some of Laddie Boy’s post–White House life, including his brief confi nement as a stray dog in Newton in late 1923.43 When President Roosevelt died, both Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley wanted Fala. The president had told his secretaries that, in case of his death, Fala should go to Suckley. Relying on this oral directive, Suckley took Fala back to her home, Wilderstein, in Rhinebeck, New York. The Roosevelt family then asserted its claims on Fala. Suckley sorrowfully surrendered the dog to Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom Fala spent the rest of his life. He died on 5 April 1952, and was buried at Hyde Park.44

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Laddie Boy as “Host” of the Easter Egg Roll of 1923 The Easter egg roll of 1923 was a well-documented and revealing episode in Laddie Boy’s life. On this rare occasion, reporters stationed in Washington, D.C., found themselves covering a major White House event at which, since all the human members of the fi rst family were out of town, the host was the fi rst dog. Vacationing in Florida, the Hardings had left Laddie Boy in the White House under the care of Master of the Hounds Jackson. Physical distance from the Hardings enhanced Laddie Boy’s standing as a celebrity in his own right. News coverage focused on the dog and not on his keepers. The result was a detailed, largely realistic, and sympathetic treatment of Laddie Boy. Indeed, as I argue here, news reports and photographs of the Easter egg roll of 1923 and the surrounding period offer valuable records relating to Laddie Boy as the symbolic fi rst dog and as a flesh-and-blood dog. Their five weeks of vacation, stretching from March into early April 1923, fell during a personally and politically difficult period for the Hardings. Florence Harding was recuperating from the kidney problems that had brought her to the brink of death in fall 1922; the president suffered lingering effects of what in January 1923 had been diagnosed as a cold or the flu. As historians now argue, Harding was already experiencing the cardiovascular problems that would claim his life by late summer.45 The Veterans’ Bureau scandal was beginning to unravel. As the fi rst couple vacationed, Charles Cramer, the bureau’s former legal counsel, committed suicide in Washington, D.C. Reporters speculated that Harding would not seek a second term, even if only out of concern for his wife’s health. By the end of March, however, Attorney General Harry Daugherty—who had managed Harding’s presidential campaign of 1920—announced that Harding would seek reelection.46 Although coverage of Laddie Boy “alone” in the White House with Jackson proved a pleasant diversion for the press and public alike, the stories of 187 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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Laddie Boy went beyond amusement. Reporters treated Laddie Boy as a serious subject, deserving sympathy and praise. An article of 6 March described the Hardings’ departure for Florida and noted that, as the couple exited the White House, Laddie Boy had run out “with something of a protest at being left behind.”47 On 19 March, the press reported that a “lonesome” and “melancholy” Laddie Boy “pined” for his master. The article claimed to be based on reports of those who had seen Laddie Boy recently but mentioned only Jackson in particular. The article made it clear that the assessment of Laddie Boy’s loneliness and sadness was based on the dog’s actions. That is, the press and its sources studied the dog’s “behavior in context” to reach conclusions about his feelings. Laddie Boy was reported to have stayed an entire night outside the absent president’s bedroom door, continued his daily routine of searching White House offices for his master, and fi nally succumbed to a loss of energy—all read as behavior indicating loneliness and sadness. Jackson admitted watching the dog closely because of fear that if given the opportunity he would leave the White House grounds to search for the president.48 Coverage of the Hardings’ return to the White House also attested to the press’s attempt to penetrate Laddie Boy’s feelings through analysis of his behavior. He was reportedly “joyous” as he greeted the Hardings, a claim substantiated by his running to the president’s car and, once its door was opened, leaping in. The president himself, it was noted, had to help the dog regain his composure.49 Coverage of the Hardings’ Florida trip included a photograph of the president with a child and a dog on his lap, taken at the home of Edward and Evalyn McLean in Palm Beach. The photograph’s lengthy caption identified the dog as the McLeans’ “family terrier” and expressed the “hope” that no one showed the photograph to Laddie Boy.50 Although the ordinary commonsense view att ributes jealousy to nonhuman animals, this caption involved the additional assumption that a photograph could make Laddie Boy jealous. What seems important to stress here is that the teasing of readers with this unrealistic possibility came in the caption to a photograph and not in a news article. During March and April 1923, reporters generally fi led news accounts of Laddie Boy that were rich in factual detail. Humor and unrealistic anthropomorphism seem to have been reserved for photograph captions and an “interview” with Laddie Boy, which fell into the distinctive “talking dog” genre rather than news coverage. Laddie Boy’s experience with White House egg rolls began in 1922, when Florence Harding revived the event. Both Hardings put in brief appearances at the 1922 egg roll. Laddie Boy, however, devoted at least the entire morning 188

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to the event and thus became one of the focal points of the resultant news stories. Assuming a special bond between dogs and children, the New York Times explained that the egg roll “wouldn’t have been a children’s party without Laddie Boy.” As the Times noted, Jackson handled Laddie Boy in place of the Hardings. Let loose by Jackson, Laddie Boy ran from the south portico into a throng of children but was so overwhelmed by all “the litt le hands put out to pat him that . . . [he] raced back” onto the portico where he passed the rest of the morning “sitt ing proudly on a table” for public viewing.51 The impression here is of a celebrity fi rst dog who for at least three hours admirably represented the fi rst family at a major function. Th is was Laddie Boy’s public role. In addition, the article offered glimpses of the dog’s more personal life: he appeared here with neither Warren nor Florence Harding but rather with his caretaker and handler and—at least on this occasion—was slightly intimidated by all the attention directed his way. Perhaps the most anthropomorphic element in the account is the reference to the “proud” Laddie Boy. But how many dog keepers, trainers, and handlers could restrain themselves from seeing pride in the eyes of a dog who had mastered the command to “sit” and performed the trick on a table for three hours amidst a crowd of eager children? At the Easter egg roll of April 2, 1923, Laddie Boy shared the spotlight with no one. According to an article in the Washington Post, the “biggest feature of the whole day for the kiddies” was Laddie Boy, whom Jackson (described here as the dog’s “guardian”) brought out onto the White House lawn for viewing.52 Other coverage went a step further in recognizing Laddie Boy’s contributions to the event. A New York Times article entitled “Laddie Boy Is Host” declared that the dog had “entertained for his mistress.” According to the article, although attendance was relatively low (possibly as a result of cold weather and the absence of the fi rst couple), the egg roll of 1923 was a joyous occasion for children. Here Laddie Boy gave one of his cutest, and possibly most tiring, public performances as fi rst dog. He arrived at the event with a basket of Easter eggs hanging around his neck. Over the course of the day he made three lengthy appearances at the egg roll, all in the company of Jackson, who each time took the dog across the White House lawn to allow as many children as possible the “opportunity to pet or play” with Laddie Boy.53 Agreeing that Laddie Boy had generally been a “fi rst-rate host” at the egg roll, a caption to a photograph that appeared on 4 April nevertheless highlighted the irony or humor of the canine host’s seizing an opportunity to eat eggs that had fallen out of a child’s basket. The caption editor wrote that Laddie Boy “stooped to catch a light lunch.”54 Th is caption is telling as it very suc189

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“In the absence of President and Mrs. Harding, Laddie Boy acted as host for the many children who rolled eggs on the White House lawn today,” 2 April 1923. (National Photo

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Company Collection, Library of Congress)

cinctly summarizes American expectations for fi rst dogs. Like the successful Laddie Boy, they must be extraordinary dogs (for example, a “fi rst-rate host”) and, at the same time, real dogs (for example, a dog eating food dropped on the ground). Moving from realistic description that stayed close to behavioral observations to the more fantastic, the Philadelphia Ledger carried an “interview” with the dog that centered on the egg roll and its effects on him. Th is was neither the fi rst time that Laddie Boy had emerged as a talking dog nor Laddie Boy’s fi rst interview. It was, however, perhaps the fi rst time that someone outside the Harding family had served as the dog’s ghostwriter. In January 1922, President Harding had used a letter he wrote from Laddie Boy to Tiger, a stage dog, to air his concerns about the responsibilities of the presidency and to make the major point that the fi rst dog both comforted the president and shared some of his White House burdens.55 In his interview immediately following the egg roll of 1923, Laddie Boy continued to develop the latter theme. Serving as the host to an estimated ten thousand children, the dog 190

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stated, had really made him appreciate the “responsibilities and cares” of a fi rst dog. Laddie Boy noted that he had begun his long day at 9:00 a.m., carried a basket of eggs around his neck, and generally had a “hard time” with the children in attendance. Th is year’s egg roll took a greater toll on him than that of the previous year because in 1922 he had been able to share “some of the entertaining” with the fi rst couple. In an indirect reference to Harding’s policy of making off-the-record statements to reporters, Laddie Boy noted that “someone” (whom he was not permitted to identify) had said that “the President’s work is never done.” He now added his own statement that the fi rst dog’s work was never done. So difficult had the Easter egg roll been on its host that Laddie Boy announced he was not “asking” for a second term. Still—and perhaps this reflected the continued sympathy of the press and public for President Harding—Laddie Boy insisted that all that really mattered was that the children had enjoyed themselves at the egg roll. Reiterating the gist of what Laddie Boy had said in his letter to Tiger (the one written by Harding), the fi rst dog concluded: “I accept the burden and responsibilities of my position together with the glory and honor that go with it.”56 Th is interview is interesting for its sympathy for Laddie Boy as the fi rst dog and, also indirectly, for the president. As Harding himself had done in Laddie Boy’s letter to Tiger, the ghostwriter here linked the president and fi rst dog tightly as a human-dog duo sharing the many responsibilities that came with the White House. For the small Harding family (president, wife, and dog)—so determined to be accessible—there were simply too many public and social obligations. The president felt not only a duty to pose for photographs and meet average Americans but also a personal inclination to do so. “I would rather set aglow a spark of grateful memory in a living fellow breast,” Harding stated, “than set a torch aflame in history.”57 In his own writings, he made it clear that he consciously decided to share some of the White House responsibilities with his dog. There are a number of ways of looking at this. From one angle, Harding showed great respect for Laddie Boy as well as trust that the fi rst dog would perform his public responsibilities well. A performing fi rst dog also fit with the president’s own history and personality. Before assuming the presidency, Harding had performed as a clown in a small circus sponsored by the Elks.58 So in his mind there was nothing demeaning about performing, even a dog’s carrying a basket of eggs around his neck. From another perspective, a physically fragile and increasingly tired fi rst couple could not meet all its public obligations and so, when one directed at children came along, the Hardings did not hesitate to let the third member of the fi rst family represent the White 191

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House. The above-cited newspaper accounts worried about the toll exacted on Laddie Boy but did not criticize his standing in for the human members of his family. Besides attesting to Laddie Boy’s acceptance as a member of the fi rst family, reports on the Hardings’ Florida trip and the Easter egg roll of 1923 show that the American press covered the fi rst dog seriously. When trying to read Laddie Boy’s feelings, reporters engaged in careful interpretation of his behavior. The Philadelphia Ledger’s move from realistic to more fantastic discussion of the effects of the egg roll on Laddie Boy required a change in genre, from a straightforward news article to an interview with the dog. Thus reckless and trivializing anthropomorphism was cordoned off from the real news about Laddie Boy’s public and private activities.

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Fala in the Presidential Campaign of 1944 The case study of Fala as “an election year personality” highlights the dog’s very public roles as a political prop for Roosevelt’s campaign for a fourth presidential term and as an active campaigner in his own canine way. In the midst of the campaign—which pitted Roosevelt against the Republican presidential candidate, Thomas E. Dewey—the president delivered his famous “Fala speech,” in which he used the dog’s anthropomorphic “fury” to ridicule his Republican opposition. The real-life Fala swayed voters with “good doggy” behavior. Voters enjoyed seeing, meeting, or just reading about the small dog who accompanied his master nearly everywhere, behaved well in public, was friendly to all, and performed simple tricks in front of small and large crowds. Fala, billed as a family dog in 1944, appeared with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt on a long campaign swing through New York City. Displaying a close bond with Fala, Eleanor Roosevelt now began to guide him through his public performances. Prior to Roosevelt’s Pacific “inspection tour” of the summer of 1944, which set the background for the Fala speech, Roosevelt and Fala had made two major, wartime inspection tours. Margaret Suckley had accompanied them and during each tour had kept a journal documenting the activities of the president, Fala, herself, and, to a lesser extent, other members of the presidential party. Especially in journal entries made during the second inspection tour of April 1943, Suckley captured Fala in his roles as an entertainer and a comfort dog. On this inspection tour, Fala thrilled groups of children, servicemen, and army nurses, many of whom already knew the dog through newspaper and magazine articles, cartoons, and the MGM short fi lm Fala: 192 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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The President’s Dog released in March 1943. When the presidential party arrived at Maxwell Field near Montgomery, Alabama, on 16 April, children at the air base recognized Fala and called his name. Suckley observed that Fala then “did the rounds, wagging his whole body.” Writing as an experienced dog owner and trainer, she saw something special in Fala’s willingness to mingle with and entertain strangers, ranging across all ages. She described him as being “kind & polite to everyone.” Two days later, over ten thousand soldiers paraded before Roosevelt at Camp Gruber, Oklahoma. As the president later met with the camp’s top brass, Suckley and Laura Delano (another member of the presidential party) toured the camp with Fala and Sister, Delano’s dog. In partnership with Suckley, Fala now helped to relax some of the rank-and-fi le soldiers and to maximize their participation in the president’s visit. The soldiers quickly sought Fala’s attention, and Fala allowed them to pet him, talk to him, place him on a wall, and perhaps pluck one of his hairs. As Fala interacted with them, the soldiers laughed and joked among themselves about charging a quarter for each pet of the dog. Although Delano saw the thirty or so excited soldiers gathered around Fala as a threatening “mob,” Fala was apparently unfazed. Within minutes of leaving the soldiers, he was honoring yet another request to be petted, this time by a man repairing Roosevelt’s special train car. On 25 April, Fala literally “stood in” for a disabled and tired president who could not walk among his troops. Ill the evening before, Roosevelt attended Easter services with the troops at Fort Riley, Kansas. Although at the service’s end the president walked a short distance, turned, and waved to the soldiers, some were disappointed that he did not address them. Th is let-down having been reported to Suckley, she and Delano used a free hour (while Roosevelt napped) to walk the dogs and let Fala mingle with and “speak” to the soldiers serving as MPs for the president’s visit.59 Attesting to what Fala meant to the human strangers whose words, pats on the head, and even more intrusive advances (such as being taken in their arms and lifted off the ground) he accepted and seemed to enjoy was the repairman’s declaration of 18 April as a red-letter day—the day on which he had worked on Roosevelt’s train car and petted Fala. Suckley speculated that all of the servicemen who had met Fala earlier the same day would write home about their time with the dog. After all, on 16 April she had concluded that touching Fala was “just a little like touching the President!”60 For Roosevelt, these inspection tours constituted wartime activity and not political display. Politics, however, intruded deeply into the Pacific tour, which took the president by train from Washington, D.C., to the Pacific coast of the United States and then by sea to Hawaii and Alaska. Fala, but neither 193

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Suckley nor Eleanor Roosevelt, embarked with the president on 15 July. Th is was shortly before the opening of the Democratic convention in Chicago to choose the party’s presidential slate for the election of 1944. By the time Roosevelt arrived in San Diego, California, the Democratic Party had nominated him for the presidency.61 On 22 July, he accepted the nomination in a speech delivered over radio from his railroad car. The New York Times carried two photographs linked to the acceptance speech: one showing Roosevelt delivering the speech in the presence of James and Anne Roosevelt, his son and daughter-in-law; the second, Fala resting in front of a radio. The caption (“Fala listens to his master”) and placement of the second photograph implied that Fala was listening to the acceptance speech.62 Visually at least, Fala was now tethered to the president’s reelection campaign. Subsequently the president and Fala boarded the cruiser Baltimore, which sailed fi rst to Hawaii for Roosevelt’s conference with General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and then to Alaska, for an inspection of an American base on the Aleutian Islands. Newspaper reports of the Pacific tour, which were delayed because of security concerns, made litt le note of Fala. Fala had been forced to stay on board the ship in Hawaii because of quarantine rules designed to protect the islands against rabies.63 In a 12 August article, the New York Times tersely reported that Fala “was along” on the president’s visit to the Aleutians.64 Th is casual mention of Fala spoke to his acceptance as Roosevelt’s constant wartime companion—to the point that dog and president became an almost inseparable pair in the American psyche (a part of history that the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., captures so strikingly).65 Fala emerged as a major figure in the Pacific tour only when its story was retold by Republican legislators. The president returned from Alaska via the Bremerton Navy Yard, across the bay from Seatt le, Washington, and from there he delivered a speech centering on the tour. Roosevelt stood on the bridge of a destroyer as he addressed the nation. He wore heavy leg braces that no longer fit properly, endured gusty winds that threatened to steal away the pages from which he spoke, and—as historians now believe—endured a painful angina attack. His lackluster delivery of a poorly written speech gave substance to rumors about his tenuous physical condition and buoyed Republican hopes for Dewey.66 Taking the offensive at the end of August, Republicans in Congress criticized the extravagance of the Pacific tour. Speaking on the floor of the House, Representative Harold Knutson of Minnesota referred to a “rumor that Fala . . . had been left behind at the Aleutians and that a destroyer was sent a thousand miles to fetch him.” The claim was that 194

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the tour and recovery of Fala had diverted key resources away from the war effort.67 The White House and Admiral William D. Leahy denied that a destroyer had been sent to rescue Fala. On 1 September, Knutson stated that Roosevelt’s “affi nity for dogs” had inclined him to believe the story but that he would accept Leahy’s denial.68 Almost two weeks later, however, Knutson demanded that Leahy tell the House if an airplane (instead of a destroyer) had rescued Fala.69 Although it seems never to have passed beyond the rumor stage, Knutson’s story put the fi rst dog squarely in the political arena. The New York Times commented that the “slugging match” between Democratic and Republican members of the House involved such “election year personalities” as the president, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Fala.70 From the Fala rumor, Roosevelt constructed a dazzling centerpiece for his next major campaign speech, delivered to the Teamsters Union on September 23. The speech reinvigorated the president’s campaign; its mixed public reception, moreover, taught the White House valuable lessons about political uses of fi rst dogs. In one memorable paragraph of the speech, Roosevelt stated that, although he and his human family could accept attacks on themselves, he and Fala resented the “libelous statements” swirling around the dog. The rumor made Fala’s “Scotch soul . . . furious.” Fala had “not been the same dog since” learning of the rumor.71 Roosevelt’s family, friends, staff, and other supporters saw the Teamsters address, subsequently called the “Fala speech,” as a turning point in the election of 1944—a point at which Roosevelt proved that he still had enough political fi re and wit to carry him through a fourth presidential campaign.72 In This I Remember, Eleanor Roosevelt expressed her belief that “Franklin really laid the foundation for Mr. Dewey’s defeat by the way in which he told the story of Fala’s indignation. . . . By ridicule, Franklin turned this silly charge to his advantage.”73 Robert Sherwood, who helped Roosevelt write some of his other speeches, credited the Fala paragraph with sett ing “the very keynote for the 1944 campaign.” Sherwood recorded the anonymous comment of a contemporary that following the speech Americans would see the campaign as “a contest of Dewey versus Fala.”74 Public reaction to the Fala speech, which was mixed,75 seemed to guide the White House in how to present Fala during the remainder of the campaign. Analysis of the speech and its reception in the New York Times documented and perhaps contributed to Fala’s redefi nition. Known hitherto as the president’s friend, constant companion, and comfort dog, Fala emerged as a performing family dog. In an early positive review of the Fala speech, Arthur Krock—Washington correspondent of the Times who from his youth 195

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had a strong interest in dogs and horses76—wrote that the speech had convinced Americans that Roosevelt was physically ready for a fourth term. Krock praised Roosevelt’s “humor, satire, and airy scorn.” He added that it was clever of the president to have made the Fala rumor seem part of the Republican Party’s “official strategy” even though Dewey was not its source.77 Within a week, Lawrence Dame, however, reported that, at least in the six states comprising New England, reaction to the Fala speech was negative. Citing letters sent to local newspapers, Dame concluded that New Englanders, especially the economically distressed farmers among them, sought “concrete relief rather than ‘animal stories.’”78 In other letters, Americans had complained that the times were “too grim” for the commander in chief to engage in “such spoofi ng.” Th is negative response, Krock later observed, had temporarily put “Fala . . . in the doghouse.”79 The Fala speech was not a realistic speech about a shaggy litt le dog. The speech relied on anthropomorphism, some of it silly: Fala was posited as having a nationality (Scotch) and feelings about a rumor (fury and resentment). Although entertaining, the anthropomorphism did not ring true since Fala certainly did not understand Knutson’s attack. The Roosevelt campaign seems subsequently to have concluded that Fala himself—a well-behaved, friendly, and entertaining dog—would be a greater campaign asset than the anthropomorphized dog. Fala was now displayed as the family dog of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Margaret Suckley remained in the shadows even as the campaign capitalized on the dog she had so carefully prepared for the White House. Suckley had handled Fala during the inspection tours of 1942–43; in 1944, Eleanor Roosevelt worked campaign audiences alongside Fala. The fi rst lady, apparently not forgett ing the positive responses to the Fala speech, even circulated a family anecdote that invited anthropomorphic speculation about Fala’s patriotism. Like Laddie Boy, Fala now greeted common visitors to the White House, performed tricks, and made very public appearances with the Roosevelts. In early October, he stole the spotlight at a conference on rural education held in the White House to sway voters from farming communities. Attending all conference sessions, Eleanor Roosevelt heard an educator from Alabama interrupt his paper to say that the “folks back home really only wanted me to say hello to Fala.” She slipped out of the conference to arrange for Fala’s appearance. Fala made a grand entrance, walking alone into the room and taking the same path used by the president just a day earlier. By simply “trotting” among the delegates and wagging his tail, Fala reportedly reduced the conference attendees to “an excited, laughing, shouting throng.” Eleanor 196

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Roosevelt then used slices of sponge cake to att ract the dog to her side and to put him through his tricks. Fala performed publicly the tricks that he had mastered under Suckley and that he did almost every evening in private for the president and his friends. As a fi nale to what the Times called a “one-dog show,” Eleanor Roosevelt held Fala and waved his right paw at the conference participants.80 Krock described “Fala’s appearance (by request)” as a “kindly note” and added that the conference participants left with a good impression of “the White House family’s” concern for the American farm.81 According to Krock, Fala’s conference “behavior” was “perfect.” Ever since the Fala speech, the dog had “conducted himself in the shrewdest . . . manner, from the political viewpoint.” Roosevelt supporters now recognized Fala as a “campaign asset.”82 At this point, Fala helped to humanize Eleanor as well as Franklin Roosevelt and to tie the couple and their dog together into one homey family—similar to the image of the Hardings and Laddie Boy. Within a few weeks, Fala made the major political appearance of his White House career. On 21 October, just two weeks before Election Day, he rode with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in their campaign tour of New York City. Both Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley traveled with the president to New York, and both rode in the official cavalcade of cars. Fala’s placement in the cavalcade left no doubt about his perceived symbolic value as the Roosevelts’ family dog. Joining the tour at the Navy Yard, Eleanor Roosevelt and Fala rode with the president in the fi rst car;83 Suckley rode in the fourth car with the president’s physical therapist and the White House staffer in charge of travel.84 Th is rainy and windy tour in an open car, stretching over four hours and fi ft y or so miles, exemplified the extreme demands placed on human and nonhuman members of fi rst families. At her press conference of 23 October, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to reveal a softer and more appealing side of the fi rst family as she spoke about a “new trick” that Fala had learned. As the national anthem was playing at a stop on the New York tour, she stated, Fala had rested his front paws on the car’s window and “stood motionless at attention.” Had Fala assumed this distinctive stance only once, Roosevelt continued, her husband might have overlooked it. The dog, however, had stood at attention at two of the tour’s “high military moments.” Conjuring up the image of a happy couple discussing their family dog, she told the assembled reporters that the trick had given her husband “great pleasure” and that he had talked repeatedly about it.85 Curiously, almost a quarter century earlier, the press had recorded Laddie Boy’s distinctive behavior during the playing of the national anthem. At a concert on the White House lawn, Laddie Boy had rested his paws on the 19 7

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rail of the south portico as he “listened to the music” and, when Harding rose for the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the dog “also stood, close beside the President.”86 Neither the reporter who observed Laddie Boy nor the Roosevelts who caught Fala standing for the national anthem made the leap from these observations to the anthropomorphic conclusion of canine patriotism. Rather they seemed to invite Americans to talk about the fi rst dog’s new tricks and to reach their own interpretations. Fala now intrigued as well as entertained. But what did Fala and the president’s talk about his new trick really have to do with American voters? President Roosevelt already had an answer to this question in a letter he had received in January 1942 from Charles Dalziel of Vallejo, California. As Dalziel wrote, he was deeply touched by the president’s fondness for Fala, whom he (using the descriptive adjectives that Suckley regularly attached to the dog) described as a shaggy and black and small companion of the president. Roosevelt’s bond with Fala made him more human, neighborly, and appealing. Dalziel now saw the president as a person who would come to his house to talk about dogs, his and the president’s.87 From this, historians can imagine—not count—the many Americans who in October 1944 joined their president, however briefly, not in wrestling with the concerns of a nation in the last stages of World War II but in talking about Fala’s standing at attention for the national anthem. Still, not every American wanted doggy stories, at least not Democratic doggy stories. A caption to a photograph in the magazine Life dismissed speculation about Fala’s behavior during the national anthem. “Fala,” the caption read, “accidentally sat up at attention during playing of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ at New York Navy Yard.”88 The campaign affected not only Fala’s public image but his private life as well. In 1944, Eleanor Roosevelt’s relationship with Fala became an integral part of her public persona and perhaps deepened on a personal level. Upon President Roosevelt’s death early in his fourth term, then, both his wife and Margaret Suckley had compelling reasons for desiring custody of Fala.

Conclusion Events surrounding the Easter egg roll of 1923 showcased a fi rst dog who was a celebrity in his own right, shared the physical burdens of the presidency, related well to children, and evoked praise and sympathy from reporters. Roosevelt’s campaign of 1944 included the use of Fala as a political prop, a pivotal speech in which the president recklessly anthropomorphized Fala, and a shift in the dog’s public image from the commander in chief ’s constant 198

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The Public and Private Lives of “First Dogs”

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companion to the Roosevelts’ entertaining family dog. The case studies of these events provide windows on the fi rst dogs’ intertwined public and private lives. For five weeks of 1923, Laddie Boy was a lonely dog as well as the celebrated and sole member of the fi rst family in residence at the White House. By August of the same year, Laddie Boy—hitherto a standard bearer for close human-dog bonds and for animal welfare—was a dog in need of a second home because of his master’s death. In 1944, Fala became a campaign asset through his oversimplified representation as the Roosevelts’ family dog. The public was able to see and appreciate his talents at performing tricks but not his adeptness at navigating the complex relationships that defi ned the private world that he and President Roosevelt inhabited. Contemporary accounts of Laddie Boy and Fala were not stereotyped accounts of any dog at any time. As these records indicate, each fi rst dog had a history, a personality, a disposition suitable to the bustle of the White House, the sociability to thrive amidst challenging webs of human-human and human-dog relationships, other special talents, key life experiences including deep attachment to an ailing presidential master who died while in office, and a role in the history of the United States, in peacetime for one and in wartime for the other. Armed with the telling sources coming from the fi rst dogs’ many human chroniclers, historical biographers ought to be able to capture these canine figures on and even in the carpet. To succeed, canine biographers must master the trick of keeping their eyes on the dogs, as much as humanly possible.

Notes 1. The quoted phrases of this paragraph are taken from Bernard E. Rollin, “Anecdote, Anthropomorphism, and Animal Behavior,” in Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals, ed. Robert W. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson, and H. Lyn Miles, 125–33 (Albany, 1997), esp. 125–28. Conclusions about Laddie Boy and Fala are mine. 2. My reading of the sources on Laddie Boy and Fala is informed by modern sociological and psychological work on human-animal relationships, including Clinton R. Sanders, “Understanding Dogs: Caretakers’ Att ributions of Mindedness in Canine-Human Relationships,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22.2 (July 1993): 205–26; and Robert W. Mitchell and Mark Hamm, “The Interpretation of Animal Psychology: Anthropomorphism or Behavior Reading?” Behaviour 134 (1997): 173–204. 3. Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography,” in Collected Essays, 4 vols. (New York, 1967), 4:229–35, esp. 229. 199

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helena pycior 4. Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (San Diego, 1983), 163. 5. Ernest Harold Baynes, Polaris: The Story of an Eskimo Dog (New York, 1923), ix–x. 6. Mary Evans, Missing Persons: The Impossibility of Auto/biography (London, 1999), 7–8 (quote). On nineteenth-century “military autobiography,” see Carolyn Steedman, The Radical Soldier’s Tale: John Pearman, 1819–1908 (London, 1988), including Steedman’s remark that she has “always known . . . that the soldier’s story is about what they can make us do; about what they can do to us” (7). 7. Arguably the most celebrated American war dog was Stubby, whose owner was reported to have written “a detailed history” of his “adventures” (Michael G. Lemish, War Dogs: A History of Loyalty and Heroism [Dulles, Va., 1996], 12, 261). 8. Ernest Harold Baynes, “Our Animal Allies in the World War,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 142 (1920–21): 168–78, 171. 9. Virginia Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” in Collected Essays, 4:221–28, esp. 226–27. 10. Jeff rey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (New York, 1995), 232. 11. Ibid. See also Stephen Jay Gould, “Animals and Us,” New York Review of Books, 25 June 1987, 20–25, esp. 23–24; and Kenneth J. Shapiro, “Understanding Dogs through Kinesthetic Empathy, Social Construction, and History,” Anthrozoös 3.3 (1990): 184–95, esp. 193–94. 12. Margaret L. Suckley and Alice Dalgliesh, The True Story of Fala (Falls Church, Va., 1997). 13. Margaret L. Suckley to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 31 May 1941, in Geoff rey C. Ward, ed., Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley (Boston, 1995), 136. 14. Review of The True Story of Fala, by Margaret L. Suckley and Alice Dalgliesh, New York Herald Tribune Books, 19 April 1942. 15. John H. Crider, “Fala, Never in the Doghouse,” New York Times, 15 October 1944. 16. James L. Clifford, From Puzzles to Portraits: Problems of a Literary Biographer (Chapel Hill, 1970), 85. In a later section on psychoanalysis in biography, Clifford advises the biographer: “Be sensitive to possible psychological quirks of character, and give all of the relevant evidence, but make no attempts at technical analysis” (131). 17. Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York, 1984), 29–30. 18. On difference and auto/biography, see Evans, Missing Persons, 13, 140–41. 19. Clifford, From Puzzles to Portraits, 102. 20. “President Gets His Wool Cloth; Laddie Boy Chases Sheep,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 11 April 1922; Suckley and Dalgliesh, True Story of Fala, 8. 21. Masson and McCarthy, When Elephants Weep, 8, 31. 22. Sanders, “Understanding Dogs,” 221. 200 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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The Public and Private Lives of “First Dogs” 23. John Berger, About Looking (New York, 1980), 12. 24. Ward, Closest Companion, ix. 25. Suckley and Dalgliesh, True Story of Fala, 7, 10–11, 8. 26. Helena Pycior, “The Making of the ‘First Dog’: President Warren G. Harding and Laddie Boy,” Society & Animals 13.2 (2005): 109–38, esp. 122–24. 27. “Master of Harding Hounds,” New York Times, 11 March 1921. 28. Margaret L. Suckley, journal entry of 25 February 1944, in Ward, Closest Companion, 280. 29. Jean Eliot, “Society,” Washington Times, 15 October 1921, microfi lm edition, roll 244, frame 675, Warren G. Harding Papers, Ohio Historical Society. For a fuller discussion, see Pycior, “The Making of the ‘First Dog,’” 125–26. 30. For this paragraph’s details and my argument, see Pycior, “The Making of the ‘First Dog,’” 127–31. 31. Suckley and Dalgliesh, True Story of Fala, 1, 31. 32. Helena Pycior, “The ‘First Dog’ at War: Fala, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and World War II,” paper presented at the 2005 annual conference of the International Society for Anthrozoology, Niagara Falls, N.Y. 33. Anelia K. Dimitrova, “Sending Bundles of Hope: The Use of Female Celebrities in Bundles for Britain’s Public Relations Campaign,” American Journalism 13.3–4 (1997): 376–90. 34. See, for example, “Footnotes on Headliners: ‘Barkers for Britain,’” New York Times, 20 July 1941. 35. “Campaign Touches Off House Fireworks,” New York Times, 2 September 1944; Crider, “Fala, Never in the Doghouse.” 36. Suckley and Dalgliesh, True Story of Fala, 59–60. 37. Suckley to Roosevelt, 31 May 1941, in Ward, Closest Companion, 136. 38. On Roosevelt’s “keen sense of his own place in history,” see Patrick J. Maney, The Roosevelt Presence: A Biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York, 1992), 193–94; and Tony Badger, “The New Deal without FDR,” in History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales, ed. T. C. W. Blanning and David Cannadine (Cambridge, U.K., 1996), 243–65, esp. 245–46. 39. Suckley to Roosevelt, 8 June 1941, in Ward, Closest Companion, 137. 40. Suckley and Dalgliesh, True Story of Fala, 33–36, 61 (quote on 32). 41. Meyer Berger, “Up and Down Pennsylvania Avenue,” New York Times, 21 January 1941. 42. On this mother-son relationship, see Carl Sferrazza Anthony, Florence Harding: The First Lady, the Jazz Age, and the Death of America’s Most Scandalous President (New York, 1998), 248. 43. “Laddie Boy Locked Up,” New York Times, 19 November 1923. 44. Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone (New York, 1972), 23; Margaret L. Suckley, “History of Heather of Wilderstein,” handwritten notebook, entries of 30 April 1945 and 10 May 1945, Wilderstein Preservation, Rhinebeck, N.Y. 201 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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helena pycior 45. Robert H. Ferrell, Ill-Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust (Columbia, Mo., 1992), 20–27; Ferrell, The Strange Deaths of President Harding (Columbia, Mo., 1996), 1–29. 46. For a synopsis of this period, see Anthony, Florence Harding, 388–99. 47. “Harding, Smiling, Off for Florida,” Philadelphia Ledger, 6 March 1923, roll 246, frame 482, Harding Papers. 48. “Laddie Boy Is Pining for Master,” Washington Times, 19 March 1923, roll 246, frame 568, Harding Papers. 49. “Laddie Boy Greets Harding on Return,” n.d., no publisher, roll 246, frame 349, Harding Papers. 50. “A Porch Party at Palm Beach,” New York Tribune, 1 April 1923, roll 246, frame 542, Harding Papers. Edward McLean was the publisher of the Washington Post. 51. “20,000 Youngsters Roll Easter Eggs,” New York Times, 18 April 1922. 52. “5,000 Kiddies Romp and Roll Eggs on White House Lawn,” Washington Post, 3 April 1923, roll 246, frame 532, Harding Papers. 53. “Laddie Boy Is Host to Capital Children,” New York Times, 3 April 1923. 54. Photograph and caption, Washington Star, 4 April 1923, roll 246, frame 551, Harding Papers. 55. For an analysis of the letter to Tiger, see Pycior, “The Making of the ‘First Dog,’” 128–31. 56. “Laddie Boy Asks No Second Term after Being Host at Egg Rolling,” Philadelphia Ledger, 3 April 1923, roll 246, frame 532, Harding Papers. 57. Warren G. Harding, “Elk’s Memorial Speeches,” typescript, ca. 1900–1914, roll 238, frame 84, Harding Papers. 58. Laddie Boy to Rex [written by Warren G. Harding], 1 April 1922, roll 254, frame 457, Harding Papers. 59. Margaret L. Suckley, journal entries of 16 April 1943, 18 April 1943, and 25 April 1943, in Ward, Closest Companion, 209–10, 213–14, 219–20. 60. Margaret L. Suckley, journal entries of 18 April 1943 and 16 April 1943, in Ward, Closest Companion, 214, 211. 61. Nathan Miller, FDR: An Intimate History (New York, 1983), 499–500. 62. “President Roosevelt Accepting Democratic Nomination,” New York Times, 22 July 1944. 63. “Pacific War Talks,” New York Times, 11 August 1944. 64. “President Visits Aleutians,” New York Times, 12 August 1944. 65. On the late-twentieth-century memorial (one “room” of which features a seated and “haggard” President Roosevelt alone with Fala), see Kelli Peduzzi, Shaping a President: Sculpting for the Roosevelt Memorial (Brookfield, Ct., 1997), 7, 14, 20. 66. Robert H. Ferrell, The Dying President: Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1944–1945 (Columbia, Mo., 1998), 82–83. 67. “Mrs. Luce Column Stirs House Clash,” New York Times, 1 September 1944. 202 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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The Public and Private Lives of “First Dogs” 68. Ibid.; “Campaign Touches Off House Fireworks,” New York Times, 2 September 1944. 69. “Presses ‘Fala’ Inquiry,” New York Times, 14 September 1944. 70. “Campaign Touches Off House Fireworks.” 71. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Teamsters’ Union Address,” 23 September 1944, in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed. Samuel I. Rosenman, 13 vols. (New York, 1938–50), 13:284–93, esp. 290. 72. On the speech and its effects, with a good introduction to Fala, see John E. Vacha, “FDR’s Fala: The Dog That Swung an Election,” Timeline (November– hDecember 1994): 36–42. 73. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (New York, 1949), 336. 74. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York, 1948), 821. 75. For an excellent discussion of the mixed reception, see Gil Troy, “‘Such Insulting Trash and Triviality’: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fala Speech Reconsidered,” Canadian Review of American Studies 25 (Winter 1995): 45–72. 76. Arthur Krock, Memoirs: Sixty Years on the Firing Line (New York, 1968), 12–13. 77. Arthur Krock, “In the Nation: Reasons Why the President’s Speech Scored,” New York Times, 26 September 1944. 78. Lawrence Dame, “New England: Dewey’s Stock Has Risen since His Campaign Started,” New York Times, 1 October 1944. 79. Arthur Krock, “Roosevelt Aides Now Appear Less Certain,” New York Times, 8 October 1944. 80. “Fala Takes Charge of White House Parley,” New York Times, 6 October 1944. 81. Arthur Krock, “White House Campaign Goes into High Gear,” New York Times, 15 October 1944. 82. Krock, “Roosevelt Aides Now Appear Less Certain.” 83. Alexander Feinberg, “Vast Th rongs See Roosevelt on Tour,” New York Times, 22 October 1944. 84. Margaret L. Suckley, journal entry of 22 October 1944, in Ward, Closest Companion, 336. 85. “First Lady Decries Fourth Term Issue,” New York Times, 25 October 1944. 86. “President and Mrs. Harding Spend Sunday Afternoon Motoring,” Evening Star, 20 August 1921, roll 244, frame 448, Harding Papers. 87. Charles J. A. Dalziel to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 17 January 1942, President’s Personal File 7288, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y. 88. “The President,” Life (6 November 1944): 24–25.

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The Legacy of Laika Celebrity, Sacrifice, and the Soviet Space Dogs

a m y n e l son

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I can’t help thinking about Laika. She had to do it for human progress. She didn’t ask to go. . . . She really must have seen things in perspective. It’s important to keep some distance . . . —Ingemar, in My Life as a Dog (Mit liv som hund), dir. Lasse Hallström, 1985

On 3 November 1957, less than a month after the successful launch of the world’s fi rst artificial satellite, the Soviet Union achieved another milestone in the space race when a small, mixed-breed dog named Laika became the fi rst living creature to orbit the earth. Sealed within the tiny cabin of Sputnik 2, Laika was provided with food, water, and a climate-control system designed to support her for several days. The space capsule was not engineered to be retrievable, so the dog’s death was a certainty from the outset. For forty years, the Soviets maintained that she had died painlessly after several days in orbit, although we now know that she succumbed to panic and overheating only a few hours into the mission. In any event, she was immediately famous. News of her fl ight made headlines around the world, fuelling Western anxieties about Soviet technological achievement and angering animal welfare groups, even as the Soviets hailed this latest victory in the Cold War. Other dogs soon joined Laika in the pantheon of canine pioneers paving the way for the fi rst manned fl ight by Yury Gagarin in April 1961. The Soviet public especially adored Belka and Strelka, who spent twenty-four hours in orbit before returning safely to earth. Their puppies became media darlings in their own 204

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The Legacy of Laika

right and, when Khrushchev gave one to the Kennedy family, participants in Cold War history. By proving that animals could survive conditions of weightlessness beyond the earth’s atmosphere, Laika and the space dogs played an important role in the space race and the Cold War. Th is study uses their celebrity and sacrifice to explore the interpretive possibilities and methodological challenges of incorporating animals into the history of the human past. While recent scholarship has examined the significance of animals in human history from the perspective of hunting, agriculture, domestication, and scientific research, the difficulties of conceptualizing a history focused on animal, rather than human subjects remain considerable.1 As Erica Fudge has noted, our access to the animals of the past is usually mediated by documents written by humans, leaving us only with representations and making it impossible to look at animals themselves.2 In the case of Laika and the space dogs, these problems of representation are offset at least partially by the fame the dogs garnered as individuals, and the opportunity to consider material relationships as well as human representations of those relationships. Although they did not leave written records or have a sense of their own “role” in history, the space dogs participated as historical actors precisely in ways that humans would or could not. They are among a select group of animals, such as Jumbo or Seabiscuit, who are famous in their own right. They are also extraordinary as the named counterparts to the no less famous but anonymous dogs used as experimental research subjects by the great physiologist, Ivan Pavlov. Like other human and animal experimental subjects, the space dogs may be considered as “boundary objects” that overlap “intersecting social worlds and realms of knowledge.”3 For many people, they were “experimental animals” playing a critical role in the production of knowledge about the environmental conditions of outer space. Others saw the dogs as “brave scouts,” “faithful servants,” or “innocent victims.” But in a historical moment where the differences between human and animal were emphasized even as the affi nities between the two were stressed, the space dogs’ status and agency as dogs was critical. Donna Haraway’s understanding of “companion species,” which emphasizes the material and semiotic interdependence between humans and domestic canines “bonded in significant otherness,”4 can help illuminate the role of dogs as historical actors in a drama that intertwined humans and animals in public and politically charged ways. Th is essay examines the linked fortunes of humans and dogs by reconstructing the history of the space dog program. It situates that story in terms of the unique tradi205

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a m y nelson

tions of Russian-Soviet science, the peculiarities of canine celebrity, and the ongoing resonance of Laika’s story and sacrifice for a diverse assortment of contemporary writers, musicians, and fi lmmakers. Beyond their scientific significance, the canine cosmonauts captured the public imagination in ways that reinforced Cold War rivalries and celebrated human technological advances, while also raising questions about the ethical treatment of animals and the relationship between dogs and humans. The Soviet space dogs achieved domestic and international fame that far surpassed that of other nonhuman space pioneers (including the American chimpanzee Ham or the French cat Felicette). For Soviet citizens, they represented the public counterpart (along with the service dogs of World War II and the notorious guard dogs of the GULAG) to the vast majority of “private” dogs, who were proliferating as family pets in the postwar years. Picked up among the strays that roamed Moscow’s streets, Laika the dog became an enduring symbol of sacrifice and human achievement. As the epigraph for this essay suggests, Laika’s story, her fame, her sacrifice, and her multivalent afterlife in global popular culture testify to the central role and resonance of “significant otherness” in human and animal histories.

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From Rocket Dogs to Space Dogs Since the end of World War II, the space programs of the United States, the Soviet Union, France, China, and Japan all have sent animals into space. Ranging from such humble organisms as fruit fl ies (fi rst sent up in V-2 rockets in 1946) and nematodes (found alive in the wreckage of the shutt le Columbia in 2003), to frogs, rats, and tortoises, these creatures have also included cats, monkeys, apes, and of course, dogs. While a broad range of scientific agendas has motivated the study of the effects of microgravity and long-term space fl ight on animals since the 1960s, the use of dogs in the Soviet space program was directly linked to the goal of putting humans into space. The possibility of space travel as a way of extending and transcending the bounds of earth’s environment had captured the Soviet imagination decades before Laika’s historic voyage. In the early Soviet period, “biocosmists” promoted the idea of space exploration in popular science journals, drawing on the utopian visions of the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903), who foresaw space travel as a way to achieve immortality and proposed that space colonization might relieve the Malthusian pressure on an overpopulated earth. The mass media also publicized the more practical theories of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), a mathematician who suggested that rocket 206 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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The Legacy of Laika

fuel propulsion could make space fl ight a reality and developed a plan for an artificial satellite in 1879.5 Practical efforts to realize these ambitions after World War II approached space both as an extension of the “nature” humans had subdued on earth and as a decidedly “unnatural” or certainly inhospitable realm that might be exploited if not conquered.6 Dogs figured prominently in the quest to determine the potential for humans to survive in space and in the development of the “closed ecological systems” (space capsules) that would make that possible. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviets sponsored missions with passenger slots for nearly sixty dogs, including fourteen who were put on fl ights between Laika’s launch in 1957 and Gagarin’s successful fl ight nearly four years later.7 The dogs’ integral role in the Soviet space program was supervised by Sergei Korolev (1907–1966), the extraordinarily gifted rocket engineer who was incarcerated in one of Stalin’s special prisons for scientists during much of World War II.8 Released and exonerated in 1945, Korolev was asked by Stalin to develop the Soviet missile program. Besides putt ing his considerable talent to use in the development of rockets for military and weaponry purposes, Korolev also pursued options for space travel and exploration by humans. In 1951, the fi rst “biological launches” took place at a secret missile test site on the desolate steppe southeast of Stalingrad (now Volgograd). Although the United States had placed monkeys in the nose cones of V-2 and A-4 rockets launched into the upper atmosphere in 1948 and 1949 (none had survived), a medical team led by Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky decided to use dogs as experimental subjects in the Soviet rockets because they felt dogs were more hardy, less excitable, and more trainable.9 Engineers worked with biologists and medical doctors to design a container that could hold two small dogs and be safely recovered. Th is involved refi ning the nose cone separation mechanism of R-IB and R-IV rockets, installing airbrakes, and developing a reliable parachute system. Among the issues that most concerned the designers were the potentially deadly effects of radiation, extreme temperatures, and the environment of vacuum, as well as the stresses of vibration, noise, and weightlessness on the dogs, who would be confi ned in a very small space. Stray dogs were selected for the program based on their weight (13–15 pounds), hardy constitutions, trainability, and light coat color, which would facilitate fi lming them during fl ight. Most of the dogs were females because their anatomy made fitt ing the antigravity suit and sanitation equipment easier. Nine dogs flew in six vertical launches between July and September 1951, with somewhat mixed results. The fi rst launch, on 22 July, had the dogs Dezik 207

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a m y nelson

and Tsygan (Gypsy) aboard. They reached an altitude of 62 miles and experienced four minutes of weightlessness before their parachute deployed and observers rushed to their cars and sped out across the desert to fi nd them. When the hatch was opened, the dogs barked, wagged their tails, and became the fi rst living beings successfully recovered from space fl ight. Although dogs returned safely from three of the remaining five launches, four died when the parachute mechanism on their capsule failed to open properly. Among the victims was Dezik, who had been redeployed for the second launch on 29 July.10 Although the vertical dog fl ights of 1951 provided valuable data, for the next few years, Korolev’s team focused its energies on improving missiles and weapons technology, and concentrated in particular on the development of the ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile). Only after Stalin’s death were Korolev’s ambitions for space travel and exploration renewed, and in 1954, he and Mikhail Tikhonravov developed plans for an artificial satellite. Their proposal att racted litt le attention from Soviet authorities, who remained focused on purely military objectives until the United States announced plans to launch its own artificial satellite in 1957 in conjunction with International Geophysical Year. Th is gave the Soviets the motivation to move forward with Korolev’s own dreams, and the space race entered a new phase.11 In the months leading up to the launch of Sputnik 1, dogs began to appear in Soviet press reports. News that rocket dogs had been sent as high as sixty miles above the earth and parachuted back safely preceded announcements that Malyshka, a veteran of the 1951 vertical launch program, “enjoyed” highaltitude fl ights.12 A photo on the front page of the New York Times showed a petite canine clad in a modified diving suit, licking her nose, and sitting next to the plastic helmet that protected her during the fl ight.13 In June, Malyshka was among the rocket dogs introduced to the foreign press in Moscow. The launch of Sputnik 1 on 4 October was initially downplayed in the Soviet Union, becoming headline news there only after the American press heralded the satellite’s success as a major technological and political triumph. Following the Sputnik 1 sensation, Khrushchev asked Korolev if another satellite could be launched in time for the celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of the revolution in early November. Korolev quickly agreed, suggesting that this apparatus, too, could carry a dog. The symbolic and scientific significance of sending a living being into orbit was enormous, and would solidify Soviet preeminence in space research. On 27 October, Moscow Radio announced that a second satellite would be launched soon, and introduced Kudriavka (Curly), a small shaggy dog who barked into the microphone, as 208

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The Legacy of Laika

its likely passenger. When the successful launch of Sputnik 2 was announced a week later, the Soviet news agency, Tass, confi rmed that an experimental animal was onboard the 1,100-pound spacecraft orbiting the earth every two hours.14 The dog’s capsule had a life-support system, including an oxygen generator and carbon dioxide absorbing device, as well as an automated feeding apparatus. Radio transmitters enabled scientists on the ground to monitor the dog’s vital signs and movement. In the West, interest in the dog was intense. The New York Times headline on 4 November, “Dog in Second Satellite Alive: May Be Recovered, Soviet Hints,” suggested widespread preoccupation with the dog’s condition and future. While official Soviet sources insisted that the animal was in good condition, speculation and skepticism about the possibility of its survival abounded. Western scientists doubted that the return of the space capsule was technically feasible, although a lecturer at the Moscow planetarium suggested that a safe return might be planned.15 On both sides of the Atlantic, animal welfare groups protested the use of the dogs in space experiments, denouncing them as cruel, unnecessary, and of litt le benefit to human health and well-being. In London, the National Canine Defense League demonstrated in front of the Soviet embassy. In New York, a canine picket line circled United Nations Plaza, bearing placards reading “Be Fair to Our Fellow Dogs” and “We’re Man’s Best Friends—Treat Us Accordingly.”16 Soviet children, who worried the dog might starve, suggested that a camel should have been sent instead. Some volunteered themselves as test pilots on future fl ights.17 By 5 November, details about the dog and its fate began to emerge. A photo of “Laika” was published in the Soviet army’s newspaper Krasnaia zvezda (Red Star) and a leading Soviet scientist discussed the mission’s progress “while the dog is still alive.”18 Knowing the name of the satellite’s celebrated passenger dispelled rumors that the space dog might answer to Limonchik (Litt le Lemon), Linda, or Kozyavka (Gnat), and prompted Western media to cease referring to it as Mutt nik. But there was still debate over whether “Laika” was the same dog who had barked over the airwaves as Kudriavka. The fact that “Laika” is both the term for “barker” and the general designator for a number of husky/spitz-type dogs used for hunting and transport in the Russian north remained confusing for Westerners, even after the Soviets clarified that the dog’s name reflected both breed characteristics and individual traits.19 The leading Soviet news magazine described Laika as a small mixed-breed dog, with a calm, phlegmatic character, who never fought with her kennel mates.20 209

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The time and circumstances of the dog’s demise also remained uncertain. For the fi rst four days after the launch, Tass communiqués described Laika’s condition as “satisfactory.”21 On 8 November, the official update indicated that physiological data were still being collected but did not comment on the dog’s condition.22 Th ree days later, Tass announced that all of the experiments had been completed successfully and transmissions from Sputnik 2 had ceased.23 It was assumed that Laika was already dead, or would die soon. The audience at the Moscow planetarium gave a collective sigh when the news was announced. In a press conference for foreign journalists a few days later, Soviet scientists reported that Laika had died when her oxygen ran out, and insisted that her demise had been painless. They announced that developing a way to return space capsules to earth safely was now a top priority, and indicated that many more dogs would fly in space before the fi rst human was sent. Laika’s satellite, which American reporters had dubbed a “rocket-shaped dog house,” remained aloft until 15 April 1958, when its decaying orbit caused it to reenter the earth’s atmosphere and incinerate.24 Although other dogs would perish in the quest to make space travel a reality for humans, Laika was the only one deliberately sent to her death. Over the next two years, dogs remained central to Soviet efforts to master space, with work proceeding along two fronts: Scientists resumed vertical launches into the upper atmosphere using dogs to gather data about the effects of weightlessness, radiation, g-forces, and extreme temperatures on living organisms. At the same time, engineers continued to design larger vehicles for orbital deployment and develop insulation and braking mechanisms that would make the safe return of these craft s possible. In August 1958, Belianka (Whitey) and Pestraia (Spott y) survived a suborbital fl ight that carried them nearly three hundred miles above the earth. Like Laika, the dogs underwent extensive training to accustom them to the cramped conditions of the space capsule, the noise of its instruments, and the vibration and pressure they would experience in the initial phases of the fl ight. While their fl ight was widely acclaimed, their fame paled in comparison to that of Otvazhnaia (Courageous), who weathered five suborbital fl ights to “great height” between June 1959 and July 1960, earning her the moniker “the world’s most traveled space dog.”25 In the London Times, a picture of Otvazhnaia and the rabbit (Marfusha) that had been her crewmate ran directly adjacent to a photograph of Malcom Carpenter, one of the seven men in training for fl ight on an American satellite.26 The Soviets pointed to Otvazhnaia’s continued good health and Marfusha’s litter of healthy kits as evidence that humans could also be protected from the potential environ210

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The Legacy of Laika

mental dangers of space.27 “Space is Gett ing Closer,” proclaimed a Soviet headline after the dog’s third fl ight.28 Meanwhile, a spacecraft had been developed with a system of retro rockets that would serve as a braking mechanism and allow it to reenter the earth’s atmosphere. The fi rst “spaceship” (korabl-sputnik) that was launched in May 1960 carried a “dummy astronaut” but no dogs. It failed to respond to ground control and was never recovered. In July, a test of the second Vostok spacecraft ended in disaster when a booster rocket exploded during the launch, killing the two dogs on board.29 Success came on 19 August, when a 10,000-pound spacecraft carried Belka (Squirrel) and Strelka (Litt le Arrow) on seventeen orbits and returned them safely to earth after twenty-four hours in space. Although an assortment of rats, mice, fruit fl ies, and plants accompanied the two dogs, acclaim for becoming the fi rst living beings to return safely from orbital fl ight focused almost exclusively on Belka and Strelka. The dogs made front-page headlines in the United States and the Soviet Union for days, and were the subjects of a series of press conferences on Moscow radio and at the Academy of Sciences. Around the world, information about the dogs and the details of their training, behavior, and response to the fl ight were eagerly sought after. The dogs’ “normal” behavior at press conferences, the publication of television images showing their calm reaction to weightlessness, and the Soviets’ assurances that postfl ight physiological tests (including EKGs) on the dogs revealed no abnormalities suggested that space fl ight was safe for canines and might soon be a reality for humans as well.30 The articulation of this expectation in Soviet headlines such as “A New Step on the Path toward Human Space Flight,” and “Astronaut, Get Ready to Travel!” was underscored when a photograph of the dogs appeared on the cover of the popular magazine Ogonek over the caption, “Space, expect a visit from Soviet man!”31 Following the triumph of Belka and Strelka’s safe return, several additional missions were scheduled in order to perfect the ground-control and braking mechanisms, and to reconfi rm that humans could expect to survive the conditions of rocket launch and weightlessness without any ill effects. The fi rst of these launches suggested that the new systems were far from foolproof. On 1 December 1960, a five-ton spacecraft carrying two dogs went out of control and burned as it reentered the atmosphere.32 A second launch later that month began auspiciously, but the third-stage rockets misfi red, triggering an emergency landing mechanism. The craft’s canine passengers were recovered cold but alive in a remote region of Siberia near the Tungus meteorite crater.33 211

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Space dogs next appeared in the news in January 1961, when the birth of Strelka’s six healthy puppies provided further proof that space travel posed no reproductive health risks. Two successful orbital fl ights with dogs and dummy astronauts in March raised expectations that a fl ight with a human passenger was imminent. When Chernushka (Blackie) was successfully recovered from her spaceship on 9 March, a cartoon in Krasnaia zvezda depicted a space dog walking out of its ship and handing off a suitcase of “data on the results of space fl ight” to a space-suit clad human.34 Zvezdochka’s (Litt le Star) safe return on 25 March after eighty-eight minutes in orbit was hailed as the “latest great victory of Soviet science.” A few days later, the Academy of Sciences hosted another press conference to show off the two newest space travelers, as well as Strelka’s furry, barking brood.35 As the focus of the Soviet space program shifted to manned fl ight, some hallmarks of the space dog program remained in place, even as the dogs receded from the limelight. Like the space dogs, Yuri Gagarin’s name was announced only when his historic voyage on 12 April was under way. Also like the space dogs, and despite his extensive training as a pilot and astronaut, he was a passenger, rather than the pilot of his spacecraft, which was controlled from the ground. Flying in the same craft used by Chernushka and Zvezdochka, Gagarin acknowledged the role the dogs had played in bringing about his triumph. Others concurred that “man’s path to space had been laid by his faithful friend, the dog.”36 But inevitably, once human space fl ight had been accomplished, the centrality of nonhumans to that endeavor began to be minimized in the master narratives of the space race. A significant step in this process was taken as early as June 1961, when officials from the Soviet embassy presented Pushinka, one of Strelka’s puppies, to the Kennedy family along with a model of a nineteenth-century whaling ship carved from walrus tusks.37 Her mother might have been a “fearless space scout,” but Pushinka, “a fluff y white puppy of distinguished parentage but undistinguished breed,” was merely a memento of the Soviets’ temporary superiority in the race for the stars. Pushinka later had puppies sired by Caroline Kennedy’s Welsh terrier, Charlie. Although the Soviets continued to send animals into space through the 1980s, Gagarin’s fl ight marked the end of an era for dogs. Canine cosmonauts did claim a fi nal milestone in 1966, when Veterok (Litt le Wind) and Ugolek (Litt le Coal) spent twenty-two days aboard the Kosmos 110, sett ing a record for canine space fl ight, and one that was broken by humans in Skylab only in 1974. For the most part, however, future canines and other creatures sent beyond the earth’s atmosphere would be identified more as scientific 212

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The Legacy of Laika

research subjects and less as celebrities. The renown enjoyed by Pushinka and her puppies as presidential pets exploited the space dog legacy, even as it tokenized the contribution of the individual dogs who helped make space travel a reality for humans.

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Science, Sentiment, and Sacrifice As experimental subjects, the space dogs were drawn into a unique and complex scientific tradition founded by Ivan Pavlov, whose research on conditional reflexes, digestion, and the nervous system was largely based on experiments on dogs. Indeed, dogs were chosen for space research in part because, thanks to Pavlov, so much was known about their physiology and their suitability to “chronic” experiments.38 Researchers’ treatment of the space dogs and discussions of the dogs in the Soviet press also perpetuated one of the most distinctive qualities of Pavlov’s own practices, namely the tension between his stance as a neutral scientist investigating indifferent, natural material and his involved, even sentimental att achment to experimental subjects.39 Rather than deny that the lives or treatment of the dogs mattered (because they were not human), or regarding them as interchangeable, anonymous, research subjects, Soviet att itudes toward the space dogs reflected a recognition of canine-human interdependence, and the unique capacities of dogs as “friends” of humanity and “servants” of science. In response to Western criticism, Soviet journalists claimed that scientists had taken great care to ensure that Laika would not suffer, citing one of Pavlov’s well-known sayings inscribed on the memorial to his laboratory dogs at the Institute of Experimental Medicine in Leningrad: “Let the dog, man’s helper and friend since pre-historic times, be sacrificed for science. But our dignity obligates us to do this only when necessary and always without unnecessary torment.”40 Others lauded the “trust” humans had invested in the dogs chosen to perform this “service to humanity” by citing Pavlov’s claim that “the dog, thanks to its long att raction to humans, and its quick-witted patience and obedience, serves the experimenter with a certain joy . . . sometimes for its whole life.”41 Th is tension between regarding dogs as helpmates, servants, and friends, and the compulsion to “sacrifice” them for science had complex and often contradictory implications. On the one hand, the dogs were treated and represented as unique individuals. They were given names, and interacted with in ways that enabled the people who worked with them to describe their “personality.” Yazdovsky remembered Laika as a “delightful, calm, sweet 213 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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dog.”42 Scientists described Belka as “happy” and “gentle,” while Strelka was “sharp-witted.”43 On the other hand, the “training” and physiological manipulations the dogs endured bore signs of invasive, potentially devastating experimentation. Monitors were implanted in the dogs prior to fl ight. Laika’s carotid artery was surgically rerouted to the outside of her neck. To accustom the dogs to the cramped quarters of the space capsule, they were confi ned in increasingly smaller cages, sometimes for days at a time, and usually in complete isolation and silence. The dogs were “conditioned” to withstand the stresses of rocket launches in centrifuges and on vibrostands. Belka and Strelka were also “trained” on a catapult that threw them nearly 23 feet into the air. Television monitors of the dogs in fl ight revealed terrified, helpless animals who tried to bite through their shackles, twitched convulsively, and vomited, prompting Yazdovsky to limit the fi rst human fl ight to a single orbit. Recognition of the “sacrifices” made by the dogs and researchers’ emotional attachments to them were evident at multiple levels, beginning with the fi rst vertical fl ights in 1951, when Anatoly Blagonravov decided to adopt Tsygan as a pet, rather than subject the dog to more rocket launches.44 Before Laika’s launch, Yazdovsky took her home to play with his children because he “wanted to do something nice for the dog. She had only a very short time to live, you see.”45 On the morning of the launch, after Laika already had been confi ned to the space capsule for three full days, technicians scrambled to pet the dog and ordered her a “last supper” from the cosmodrome’s cafeteria, consisting of soup, a main course, and dessert.46 Although everyone soon knew that Laika was doomed, the details of her fate remained a secret until 2002. For decades, published sources in the Soviet Union maintained that she died painlessly after her oxygen supply ran out on the seventh day of her fl ight. But speculation about what had “really happened” abounded. Some maintained that her fi nal portion of food was poisoned, or that a deadly gas was injected into her capsule.47 In the 1990s, Russian sources revealed that problems with the thermal-control system had caused overheating in the dog’s capsule, causing her to succumb to heat exhaustion after four days in orbit.48 Finally, in 2002, a researcher at the Institute for Biological Problems in Moscow revealed new information about the design of Laika’s spacecraft, including details of the life-support system and the monitoring of the dog’s movements, respiration rate, maximum arterial pressure, and electrocardiogram values via telemetry to the ground. She had indeed survived the launch into orbit, although increased pulse and respiration rates indicated that she was stressed during the peak acceleration phase 214

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The Legacy of Laika

of the fl ight. At the start of weightlessness, these values returned to near normal. But telemetry also showed that the temperature and humidity inside the dog’s cabin increased steadily. When the satellite was on its third orbit of the earth, the transmissions from the dog ceased. She had survived for about six hours after the launch.49 Although the value of her “sacrifice” was immediately acknowledged, that recognition was qualified with a regret best articulated in 1998 by Oleg Gazenko, one of the physicians who oversaw the space dog program: “The more time passes the more I am sorry about it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of a dog.”50

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Constructing Canine Celebrity and Heroism The space dogs’ fame drew on a number of interlinked discourses involving human att itudes toward dogs, the traditions of Russian-Soviet science, and superpower rivalries. Most importantly, the canine cosmonauts served as ideal foils for a regime intent on protecting scientific secrets and trumpeting its accomplishments. The dogs’ names, photographs, and some details about their training and temperament could be safely broadcast without compromising the security of the human forces behind the missions’ success. Focusing attention on the dogs also made it less obvious that litt le other meaningful information about the space program was available. Immediately after the launch of Sputnik 1, the identities of the people most responsible for its success were classified as top secret. For many years, Korolev, Tikhonravov, Valentin Glushko, and Mstislav Keldysh were never identified by name, and were referred to in the press only by such anonymous titles as “Chief Designer of Rocket-Space Systems,” or “Chief Theoretician of Cosmonautics.”51 Public discussion of the program was delegated to politically reliable spokespeople with litt le direct involvement in its operations. The veil of secrecy extended to specific information about the design, functioning, and physical location of spacecraft, and the broader objectives of the space program as well. Of course, information about the dogs was also carefully controlled. Their anthropomorphic celebrity was crafted to facilitate a connection between the dogs and ordinary people who were interested in space exploration or might have a pet dog at home. In most cases, the fi rst photographs of the dogs were published when their mission was announced, usually on launch day. Invariably, these were close-up “headshots,” clearly modeled on the formal portraits of humans that often accompanied news stories. Sometimes these images were fairly nondescript, and served primarily to link “a name 2 15 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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with a face” and provide “proof ” that the individual existed. In the case of Laika, the angle of the image and the pose of the dog in the photo published on 5 November 1957 were carefully calculated to convey a sense of the dog’s confidence and alertness. In contrast, postfl ight photographs showed relaxed, happy, and often panting pooches. Photos of Otvazhnaia lounging underneath Marfusha, the rabbit, and next to her canine comrade, Malek, betrayed no sign of the animals’ involvement in rocket launches. They could have been members of a circus act, or an unusual trio of pets. When the dogs were displayed for journalists, their handlers described their behavior and relationships in anthropomorphic terms, insisting that Otvazhnaia’s name (Courageous) reflected her bravery and her enthusiasm for flying in rockets. They also poked fun at Malek’s “cowardice,” noting that he had whimpered as the crane lifted his capsule onto the top of the ballistic missile that would send him to the outer reaches of the atmosphere.52 Beginning with Belka and Strelka, the media campaign became more elaborate, and the visual associations with technology and space fl ight more explicit. On the one hand, the space dogs’ handlers portrayed their charges as “normal dogs,” emphasizing their interest in treats, pett ing, and other “normal dog” behavior. They were described as “quick-witted, obedient, and healthy,” suggesting the desired traits any dog lover would seek in a pet. After Strelka’s puppies were born, photos of the canine “family” emphasized Strelka’s attentive maternal instincts, the puppies’ physical vitality, playfulness, and that inescapable “cute factor.”53 On the other hand, “the most famous dogs on earth” wore fl ight suits to their press conferences and were photographed standing atop scientific equipment. Cartoons of the dogs suggested that space fl ight was challenging, but fun. When journalists viewed television images of the dogs lying inert and helpless in the fi rst moments of weightlessness during the fl ight, they were told that the dogs were “resting” before sett ling down to their “breakfast.”54 In addition, the dogs’ triumphs competed and were intertwined with other Cold War milestones. In the Soviet Union, news of Laika’s voyage in Sputnik 2 vied for top billing with photos of Mao Zedong greeting Khrushchev and other dignitaries assembling to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. In both the Soviet Union and the United States, Belka and Strelka’s successful return received as much news coverage as the sentencing of the American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers to ten years in Soviet prison. President Kennedy’s inauguration garnered scant notice in Soviet newspapers, which elected to run photos and news of the birth of Strelka’s

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The Legacy of Laika

puppies instead. Clearly political agendas in Moscow and Washington drove a considerable part of the dogs’ fame. Besides being the focus of a carefully crafted media campaign, the space dogs tapped into a broader tradition of canine renown. As “courageous scouts,” they validated and reinforced a model of canine heroism that mirrored popular constructions of canine virtue and informed a resurgence of pet keeping in the Soviet Union after World War II. Although the Bolsheviks had stigmatized keeping pets for pleasure and companionship as decadent and bourgeois, the family dog made a cautious comeback in the postwar period.55 Among the many factors influencing this trend was an ethos of utility, which stressed the practical value of dogs as “workers” who helped humans hunt wild animals, herd livestock, and protect socialist property. Socialist ideology also valued dogs’ contributions to the military during the war and their long-standing importance to scientific research. To offset the narrowly individualistic motivations of “bourgeois” pet keeping, postwar dog care manuals cited dogs’ long-standing collaboration with humans and their “service” to the Soviet state as evidence of canine loyalty and devotion.56 The celebrity of individual dogs and the contributions of dogs to military endeavors and Soviet science validated the status and reinforced perceptions of the ideal pet. Dogs’ service during the war as messengers and bomb detectors, as well as in fi rst aid and search and rescue was particularly important, serving as a starting point for many postwar commentaries on the place of dogs in contemporary urban life.57 Ironically, the heroism of the canine veterans was grounded both in their contribution to the decidedly human enterprise of the Soviet war effort and the fact that the dogs’ nonhuman status and distinctively canine qualities made these contributions possible: They were used as mine detectors and messengers because they had physical att ributes humans lacked (such as a keen sense of smell), at the same time they were deployed in missions deemed too dangerous for people (such as taking medical supplies to besieged troops). With the space dogs, this appreciation of canine achievement precisely for its incalculable service to human causes was even more pronounced. When the National Canine Defense League protested on Laika’s behalf in front of the Soviet embassy in London, the Soviet spokesman passionately insisted that: “Russians love dogs too,” but also asserted that sacrifices had to be made. He claimed that his own family had donated its German shepherd to the army during the war.58 After 1957, Soviet dog-care books invariably paid homage to the space dogs, especially Laika, suggesting that the quintessentially Russian

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concept of the podvig, usually translated as “feat,” but carrying strong connotations of extraordinary courage and self-sacrifice as well, was not confi ned to human endeavor.59 Official canine heroism and sacrifice for the greater Soviet cause reinforced and mirrored the personal loyalty and devotion of the family dog.

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Achievement and Loss: The Legacy of Laika For nearly all of the space dogs, fame proved to be fleeting, as the world’s attention quickly shifted from their exploits to the even more compelling drama of human space travel and exploration. Laika, however, proved to be the exception. The significance of her voyage and the fact of her death informed an enduring celebrity and complex memory.60 Soviet tributes to the canine pioneer began within a year of her journey. Soon after her fl ight, a brass tag was attached to her kennel with the inscription: “Here lived the dog Laika, the fi rst to orbit our planet on an earth satellite, November 3, 1957.”61 In keeping with a well-established tradition of commemorating historic events and individuals, the Soviet mint issued an enamel pin in honor of “The First Passenger in Space,” showing the dog’s head and a rocket hovering over the earth on a field of stars. Official commemorations in other countries soon followed, as stamps bearing the dog’s likeness were issued in Romania (1957), Albania (1962), Poland (1964), and Sharjah/Mongolia (1963), as well as North Korea (1987).62 In the fall of 1958, the Soviet Union began to market its fi rst fi ltered cigarette, using Laika’s name and image on the wrapper, and initiating a now fi ft y-year-old process of commodification and “branding” of the space dog.63 While a pin or a stamp might be a fairly straightforward token of a significant event or individual, other tributes to Laika are more complex. For example, a monument to fallen cosmonauts erected in Star City near Moscow in 1997 includes a likeness of Laika peering up from the corner at the faces of humans who also died in the conquest of space. In this monument, Laika is both dog and cosmonaut. She is smaller and less prominent than the humans, but her status as dog is neither mitigated nor minimized. Rather her canine condition is a link to the human cosmonauts that hinges on relationships of power and subordination, as well as difference and dependence. These associations with sacrifice, loss, exploitation, and experimentation that fueled Laika’s immediate celebrity also inform her multivalent and continued echoes in global popular culture over the last twenty years or so. Among the earliest and most explicit examples of this resonance is the 1985 218 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

The Legacy of Laika

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Laika pin, 1957. (Author’s photograph)

fi lm My Life as a Dog. Set in Sweden in the late 1950s, Lasse Halström’s drama charts the coming of age of a boy named Ingemar, who copes with his mother’s failing health and her inability to care for him by reminding himself of Laika’s plight. He worries that Laika starved to death, identifies with her helplessness, and laments her physical isolation in an effort to gain perspective on his own abandonment and loss, which culminate in the death of his mother and his own beloved dog, Sickan. A number of literary endeavors refer to or are inspired by Laika as well. Among these are children’s books, such as Chris Dubbs’s Space Dogs (2003), and science fiction works, including the Doctor Who novel Alien Bodies (1998), by Lawrence Miles, and Star Wreck 7: The Fido Frontier, a parody of the television series Star Trek that revolves around “Captain Ricardo’s” bungled efforts to fi nd Laika and deliver her to a “Starfreak” museum. Laika’s story also informs more serious explorations of loneliness and alienation by the British writer James Flint in Habitus (2000), and the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, whose novel Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) appeared in English translation in 2001. The fi rst space dog appears as a grateful companion to a world-weary Atlas in Jeanette Winterson’s Weight (2005), a witt y retelling of a classic myth cum meditation on choice, freedom, and coercion. Music groups from countries around the globe have dedicated songs to Laika, and three have adopted her name as their own.64 The most long-lasting of these was the Finnish surf band Laika and the Cosmonauts, which released eight albums over its twenty-year career (1988–2008) and counted Quentin Tarantino among its diehard fans.65 But certainly the most explicit homage to the space dog and her legacy belongs to the eclectic British rock duo Laika, 219

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which uses sampling and electronics to achieve a celestial, innovative sound, and features an image of Laika on its album covers. Margaret Fiedler and Guy Fixsen explained their choice of name as follows: “[W]e liked the sound of the word and we liked the association with being ‘out there’ in terms of experimentation while at the same time being a warm furry organic thing. . . . The other reason we like the name is that it was probably the most high profi le animal experiment ever—Laika died up there in her capsule—and we are strong believers in animal rights and things that seem kind of obvious to us, like not eating them.”66 Additional evidence of Laika’s continued resonance is found in the astonishing number of Web sites devoted to the dog. These range from a “rainbow bridge” memorial that places Laika in the sentimentalized cosmology of grieving pet owners, to sites concerned primarily with space history, stamp collecting, or vending space dog memorabilia.67 A rescue organization for homeless animals in Moscow chose Laika for its Web site logo because “she represents for us the plight of homeless animals everywhere—abandoned or exploited, but rarely treated with the respect and compassion which all living creatures deserve.”68 All of this suggests that Laika is an extraordinary animal with an extraordinary history. Just as the history of the domestic dog is inextricably bound up with the history of humanity, Laika’s story, and that of the space dogs more generally, is intertwined with human stories—stories of Cold War rivalry, of exploration and adventure, of loss and sacrifice, and of relationships and dreams. She is famous as a dog, as a pioneer, as a victim, and as a symbol of human aspiration. The anthropomorphic and anthropocentric inflections of her celebrity may say more about the relationship between people and dogs than about the reality of her experience, but they do not undermine the most essential ingredient of her fame and her place in history—her life as a dog.

Notes 1. Matt Cartmill, A View to Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger, Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution (Chicago, 2001); Juliet Clutton-Brock, A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals (Cambridge, U.K., 1987); Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore, 2003). Animal-centered” discussions of recent developments in environmental history include Harriet Ritvo, “Animal Planet,” Environmental History 9 (2004): 204–20; and Edmund Russell, “Evolutionary History: Prospectus for a New Field,” Environmental History 8 (2003): 204–29. 220

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The Legacy of Laika 2. “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), 6. 3. Guerrini, Experimenting, x. On the sociological concept of “boundary object,” see Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Object: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Social Studies of Science 19 (1989): 387–420. 4. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago, 2003), 16; Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, 2008), 15–19, 165. 5. James T. Andrews, Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917–1934 (College Station, Tex., 2003), 85–86. 6. Peder Anker, “The Ecological Colonization of Space,” Environmental History 10 (2005): 239–68. 7. Asif Siddiqi, “There It Is! An Account of the First Dogs-in-Space Program,” Quest 5.3 (1996): 38–42; Colin Burgess, “Dogs Who Rode in Rockets,” Spaceflight 38 (December 1996): 421–23; A. I. Ostashev and Elena Iur’evna Bashilova, comps., “Prelestnaia, spokoinaia Laika byla slavnoi sobakoi: k 45-letiiu so dnia zapuska vtorogo ISZ,” Istoricheskii arkhiv 6 (2002): 11–18; Colin Burgess and Chris Dubbs, Animals in Space: From Research Rockets to the Space Shuttle (Berlin, 2007), 61–84, 143–68, 203–19. 8. The most important recent scholarship on the Soviet space program includes Asif A. Siddiqi, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge (Gainesville, Fla., 2000); James Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon (New York, 1997); Yu. A. Mozzhorin et al., eds., Dorogi v kosmos, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1992); Yaroslav Golovanov, Korolev: Fakty i mify (Moscow, 1994); Yu. A. Mozzhorin et al., eds., Nachalo kosmicheksoi ery: Vospominaniia veteranov raketno-kosmicheskoi techniki i kosmonavtiki: Vypusk vtoroi (Moscow, 1994); and B. E. Chertok, Rakety i liudi, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1995–99) (English translation, Rockets and People, ed. Asif Siddiqi, 4 vols. [Washington, D.C., 2005–]). 9. Mozzhorin, Dorogi, 2:124–25. 10. Siddiqi, Sputnik, 65–96. 11. Ibid., 145. 12. “Dogs Unharmed Sixty Miles Up,” Times (London), 18 February 1957; “Dogs in 70-mile Rocket Flights,” Times (London), 3 June 1957; “Soviet ‘Rocket Dogs’ Get Geophysical Year Role,” New York Times, 9 June 1957; Literaturnaia gazeta, 8 June 1957. The Soviets conducted more high-altitude rocket fl ights with dogs between 1954 and 1960 (see Burgess and Dubbs, Animals, 381–82; and Burgess, “Dogs Who Rode in Rockets,” 423). 13. “An Old Hand at Space Travel, the Russians Say,” New York Times, 25 March 1957.

221 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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a m y nelson 14. “Vtoroi iskusstvenyi sputnik vrashchaetsia vokrug zemli,” Izvestiia, 5 November 1957; “Soobshchenie TASS,” Pravda, 4 November 1957. 15. Times (London), 4, 5, and 8 November 1957. 16. New York Times, 4 November 1957; New York Times, 5 November 1957; Times (London), 4 November 1957. 17. V. Polynin, “Sovetskim sputnikam privet!” Ogonek 46 (1957): 6. 18. Krasnaia zvezda, 5 November 1957; “O dvizhenii vtorogo iskusstvennogo sputnika zemli,” Izvestiia, 5 November 1957; “Russian Indicates That Dog Will Die,” New York Times, 5 November 1957. 19. Irina Volk, “Zhivoe suchshestvo v kosmose,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 5 November 1957; “Name of Satellite Dog Breeds Confusion Here,” New York Times, 5 November 1957. 20. S. Morozov, “Pervyi puteshestvennik v kosmos,” Ogonek 46 (1957): 7. 21. “Soobshchenie TASS,” Pravda, 4 November 1957; “Vtoroi iskusstvenyi sputnik vrashchaetsia vokrug zemli,” Izvestiia, 5 November 1957; “O dvizhenii iskusstvennykh sputnikov zemli,” Krasnaia zvezda, 6 November 1957; “O dvizhenii iskusstvennykh sputnikov zemli,” Izvestiia, 7 November 1957. 22. “O nabliudenii iskusstvennykh sputnikov zemli,” Pravda, 8 November 1957. 23. “O nabliudenii iskusstvennykh sputnikov zemli,” Izvestiia, 11 November 1957. 24. “Satellite Return Set as Soviet Goal,” New York Times 16 November 1957; Pravda, 13 November 1957; New York Times, 7 November 1957. 25. “Soviet Space Dog Survives 4th Trip,” New York Times, 14 July 1959. 26. Times (London), 9 July 1959. 27. A. Golikov, “Piat’ poletov ‘Otvazhnoi,’” Ogonek 28 (1960): 30. 28. “Kosmos stal blizhe,” Izvestiia, 8 July 1959. 29. Kelly Kizer Whitt , “Reluctant Astronauts: How Other Creatures Paved the Way for Human Space Travelers,” Astronomy 29:4 (2001): 42. 30. “2 Dogs Frisky after Space Trip; Condition ‘Perfect,’ Soviet Says,” New York Times, 22 August 1960; “Satellite Dogs Shown in Moscow,” New York Times, 23 August 1960; “Vydaiushcheesia dostizhenie sovetskoi nauki i tekhniki,” Krasnaia zvezda, 25 August 1960; “Krugovorot prirody v kabine kosmicheskogo korablia,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 27 August 1960, 1. 31. “Sdelan novyi shag na puti k poletu cheloveka v kosmos,” Krasnaia zvezda, 20 August 1960; “Kosmonavt, gotov’sia v put,’” Literaturnaia gazeta, 23 August 1960, 1; Ogonek 35 (1960). 32. “5-Ton Soviet Space Craft with 2 Dogs Put in Orbit,” New York Times, 2 December 1960; “Soviet Space Craft with Dogs Aboard Burns on Re-entry,” New York Times, 3 December 1960; “Tretii kosmicheskii v polete,” Krasnaia zvezda, 2 December 1960; “O polete tret’ego sovetskogo korablia-sputnika,” Krasnaia zvezda, 3 December 1960. 33. Siddiqi, Sputnik, 259–60. 222 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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The Legacy of Laika 34. Krasnaia zvezda, 11 March 1961. 35. “Kosmonavty, tovs’!” Krasnaia zvezda, 29 March 1961. 36. “Svershilos’!” Krasnaia zvezda, 13 April 1961. 37. “Kennedys Get Puppy as a Gift from Khrushchev,” New York Times, 21 June 1961; “Soviet Space Pup for Mrs. Kennedy,” Times (London), 21 June 1961. 38. Peter L. Smolders, Soviets in Space, trans. Marian Powell (New York, 1974), 103–4; V. Borisov and O. Gorlov, Zhizn’ i kosmos (Moscow, 1961), 138. 39. Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, eds., Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881–1940 (Oxford, 1998), 254–55; Daniel Todes, Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise (Baltimore, 2002), 123–52. 40. Volk, “Zhivoe suchchestvo,” 2. 41. I. Strel’chuk and N. Gartsshtein, “Chetveronogie pomoshchniki uchenykh,” Krasnaia gazeta, 27 August 1960. 42. Ostashev and Bashilova, “Prelestnaia, spokoinaia Laika,” 13. 43. Golikov and Smirnov, “Mezhzvezdnye puteshestnenniki,” 2. 44. Siddiqi, Sputnik, 96. 45. Golovanov, Korolev, 550. 46. Volk, “Zhivoe sushchestvo”; Ostashev and Bashilova, “Prelestnaia, spokoinaia Laika,” 13. 47. For a current summary of these rumors, see “Memorial to Laika,” www .novareinna.com/bridge/laika.html; and Ted Strong, “Laika the Russian Space Dog!” htt p://tedstrong.com/laika-trsd.shtml. 48. Mozzhorin et al., Dorogi v kosmos, 1:60; Golovanov, Korolev, 551. 49. Sven Grahn, “Sputnik 2—Was It Really Built in Less Than a Month?” www .svengrahn.pp.se/histind/Sputnik2/Sputnik2.htm; David Whitehouse, “First Dog in Space Died within Hours,” BBC News Online, 28 October 2002, htt p://news. bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2367681.stm; Tim Radford, “Fate of First Canine Cosmonaut Revealed,” Guardian (Manchester), 30 October 2002, www.guardian.co.uk /international/story/0,3604,822152,00.html. 50. Justine Hankins, “Lost in Space,” Guardian (Manchester), 20 March 2004, www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1172484,00.html. 51. Siddiqi, Sputnik, 169. Korolev’s identity was not revealed until after his death in 1966. 52. Golikov, “Piat’ poletov Otvazhnoi,” 30. 53. “Belka, Strelka, i shcheniata,” Ogonek 8 (1961): 32–33. 54. Golikov and Smirnov, “Mezhzvezdnye puteshestvenniki,” 2. 55. Amy Nelson, “A Hearth for a Dog: The Paradoxes of Soviet Pet Keeping,” in Borders of Socialism: The Private Sphere in the Soviet Union, ed. Lewis Siegelbaum, 123–44 (New York, 2006). 56. Nikolai Vasil’evich Demidov and Miron Borisovich Rivchun, Sobaki i koshki v bytu (Moscow, 1959), 3; A. M. Chel’tsov-Bebutov and N. N. Nemnonov, Nashi vernye druz’ia (Moscow, 1974), 5. 223 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

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a m y nelson 57. Demidov and Rivchun, Sobaki, 8–10; “Tol’ko li drug?” Sovetskaia Rossiia, July 16, 1971; B. Bialik, “Zhizn’ i smert’ Belogo Bima,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 17 September 1971. 58. Kenneth Love, “Britons Protest Dog in Satellite,” New York Times, 5 November 1957. 59. Chel’tsov and Nemnonov, Nashi, 5; Demidov and Rivchun, Sobaki, 5; B. Riabinin, Moi druz’ia (Moscow, 1963). 60. The cultural legacy of the fi rst space dog is examined in more detail in Amy Nelson, “The Music of Memory and Forgett ing: Global Echoes of Sputnik 2,” in Remembering the Space Age, ed. Steven J. Dick (Washington, D.C., 2008), 237–52; Amy Nelson, “Der abwesende Freund: Laikas kulturelles Nachleben,” in Ich, das Tier: Tiere als Persönlichkeiten in der Kulturgeschichte, ed. Jessica Ullrich, Friedrich Weltzien, and Heike Fuhlbrügge (Berlin, 2008), 215–24. 61. A. Golikov and I. Smirnov, “Chetveronogie astronavty,” Ogonek 49 (1960): 2. 62. The Soviet Union and several other Eastern Bloc countries issued stamps depicting other space dogs, especially Belka and Strelka, and Chernushka and Zvezdochka. 63. “Soviet Smokers Now Have Filters,” New York Times, 11 September 1958. 64. For a discography of music inspired by Laika, see Nelson, “Music of Memory,” 251–52. 65. “Laika and the Cosmonauts,” www.laikaandthecosmonauts.com/. 66. “Laika,” www.laika.org/index_main.shtml. 67. “Memorial to Laika”; Strong, “Laika”; Sven Grahn, “Sputnik-2: More News from Distant History,” www.svengrahn.pp.se/histind/Sputnik2/sputnik2more .html; Grahn, “Sputnik 2—Was It Really Built in Less Than a Month?”; Melissa Snowden, “Russian Space Dogs,” www.silverdalen.se/stamps/dogs/library/ library_space_dogs_russian.htm. 68. “Moscow Animals,” www.moscowanimals.org/index.html.

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PART IV

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Animating the City and the Countryside

Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:32:32.

The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City

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Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are fi lled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? —Bertolt Brecht, A Worker Reads History (1947)

Historians usually depict the nineteenth century as the age of the steam engine, but the giant cities created by the new railroad networks could never have functioned without equine labor, too, incongruous as that seems. Horses hauled the goods essential for growth in those cities from depot to worksite and to consumers. Horse-powered transit allowed burgeoning urban populations to deconcentrate. Urban historians have paid too litt le attention to these four-legged workers, whether in the streets or on the docks, in construction or in factories. On average, cities required one horse for every twenty people. Some horse populations were huge: in 1900, approximately 130,000 horses worked in Manhattan; 74,000 in Chicago; and 51,000 in Philadelphia. Herds grew fastest during the period of rapid urban growth between the arrival of steam transport around 1850 and the electrification of trolleys around 1890. Census data, although imprecise, suggest that horses were urbanizing more rapidly than humans. The number of horses continued to grow after 1890, probably peaking around 1907 or 1908 and declining slowly thereafter.1 Not only did the number of horses rise dramatically between 1850 and 1890, but the weight of the typical urban draft horse increased by roughly 227

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50 percent. Th is was the product of importing very large Percheron stallions from France and shift ing the centers of horse-rearing to the calcium-rich grasses of the Midwest. These changes in breeding and feeding reflected a greater economic value attached to horses as working machines, essential to the functioning of an urban, industrial economy. Animals seem antithetical to urbanization. Cities represent civilization and the conquest of nature. The city was and is supposed to be on the human side of the human/animal dichotomy. The presence of vast and growing herds of animals in increasingly “civilized” cities seems paradoxical. It occurred at exactly the time that urbanites, mostly because of health concerns, were becoming more sensitive to auditory or olfactory pollution by animals and when city dwellers were increasing protesting the “presence of livestock animals in cities.”2 These objections increased, especially after the 1890s, when mechanical alternatives such as motor vehicles and electric transit began to appear. Before then, nineteenth-century cities were built around the needs of horses, a fact that few urban historians have noticed. Asphalt pavements, romantically designed park drives, radial boulevards, gridiron street plans, sidewalks, and much wider streets were all, to a large extent, the consequences of equine technology. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century humans largely viewed the horse as a power-producing artifact and considerably improved them by careful breeding, by diets modified to the latest understanding of nutritional science, by castration, and by devices such as bits, blinders, and horseshoes. In many crucial respects, the horse was regarded more as a technology than as a living being. Most humans—especially those who profited from using the animal, such as teamsters, cab drivers, and street-tram owners—perceived horses as machines and compared them closely in terms of cost and efficiency to both other animals, including humans, as well as a variety of mechanical technologies.3 Everything that horses pulled through or hoisted in cities could have been powered by steam engines as early as 1855, but at a higher cost. Because of cost considerations, the animate triumphed over the inanimate. The distinguished Dutch scholar Gijs Mom notes: “These fleets [of horsepulled vehicles], became highly organized enterprises with scientific horse feed management (its composition being continuously adjusted to market prices of the various ingredients) and a modern personnel management no less impressive than the big railway companies.”4 So horses became “personnel.” Anne N. Green, a leading scholar of this subject, writes that such horses were “integral components of the most modern technological systems.”5 The environmental historian Edward Russell places animals among the “van228

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The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City

guards of technology” and believes that “industrialization was a biological as well as a mechanical process.”6 To be sure, horses were living beings, and this essay also tries to apply the methods of urban ethnography, thinking about horses as another group of inarticulate urban workers. Labor historians, a recent challenge to the contrary notwithstanding, have never looked closely at this group of workers.7 The mechanistic view of animals was most evident when managers compared horses to other creatures such as oxen, donkeys, dogs, even humans, as well as steam engines.8 Implicitly this involved knowing how much power an engine or a human could deliver, since the point of the comparison was to facilitate engineering decisions. A “consciously scientific approach to manpower and horsepower” fi rst appeared in Memoirs of the French Academy (1699), which compared the horizontal strength of a horse and a man. Horses, it speculated, were equal to six or seven men. Later empirical research would produce results not far different.9 In 1775, James Watt developed the still-customary idea of “horsepower,” defi ned as 33,000 foot-pounds of work per minute. He needed this standard because his engines often replaced horses in industrial applications and consumers wanted a ratio of horse/steam equivalency.10 Watt was approximating, however, and over the next century engineers conducted comparative trials. Th is research ultimately led to the development of the laws of thermodynamics, which applied to animals as well as machines, and to the invention of the dynamometer, a very precise measuring device.11 One horse breeder called the dynamometer “the biggest thing that has ever happened in draft horse history. Horses for breeding purposes can now be chosen because of their worth ascertained by actual performance.”12 The new device also facilitated comparisons between species and between animals and machines. In 1839, the engineer Elwood Morris conducted experiments on horses powering canal pumps. Individual horses lifted between 9.5 million and 17.2 million pounds per shift . While size was important, it did not explain most variation. Morris believed that such factors as wind, lameness, and even “will” explained more. Probably the best-known engineer interested in these matters was Robert Thurston, founder of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, who wrote about the horse “considered as a machine.” Thurston adopted a comparative perspective by species (oddly he took no account of variations in ability within each, although he acknowledged its importance), type of work, and time. For a four-hour shift, he concluded that humans could move 4,420 foot-pounds per minute, horses 24,780, mules 16,530, and oxen 22,044. In four-hour shift s, humans tired a litt le more than horses and 229

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much less than oxen. If the work shift was eight hours, humans tired much more rapidly. He stated: “In the selection and employment of men and animals the engineer is compelled to regard them as machines.”13 Another authority argued that “animals acting as prime movers have a higher efficiency than any inorganic machines.”14 He measured the efficiency of horses not just in strength but also in fuel consumption, initial cost, and maintenance, whether compared to other animals or to steam or later to electric motors. For some loads over some distances, horses were more profitable than steam. There was much research on these matters, hardly surprisingly, given their economic importance. Horsepower proved superior to steam power for transit. A close analysis before the Civil War had claimed that a steam engine cost 42 percent more to operate per day than did a horse. In 1866, at least eight New York streetrailway companies were experimenting with light steam-powered vehicles, but all gave up on them by 1870—the biological had triumphed over the purely mechanical.15 Scientific analysis of horses became quite refi ned. The 1900 edition of the U.S. Index Catalog of the Surgeon General listed nearly one hundred works published since 1860 on animal fatigue, a new category, and a sign of the growing attention being paid to the metabolism of this organic power source.16 Thurston had analyzed metabolic efficiency as well, noting that well-fed animals generated about five calories of heat per gram of oxygen inhaled, making them more efficient as prime movers than steam engines.17 Horse owners valued them almost exclusively for their productive utility. They were living machines to be bought and sold, only rarely valued as natural beings. The willingness of owners to kill animals that had become even slightly lame—that is, had lost their productive value—is a powerful measure of this.18 Presumably, if horses were companion animals like modern pets or were living in nature, they would have been allowed to graze out their lives to the extent that their disability allowed. The killing of injured horses occurred not just because owners valued horses only for their work, but also because their carcasses carried considerable value, generating income for tanners and renderers, among others. Even the wastes of horses provided cash returns since manure was a valued fertilizer. The trade in living beings, used to the extent possible as machines, exactly typified what Donald Worster has described as the late Victorian defi nition of civilization: “the necessary, rational management of nature.”19 Ownership and operation of the biological machine became more centralized in the mid-nineteenth century, most obviously as street railways replaced walking but also as express companies and other delivery services re230

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The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City

placed individual carters. An urban hackman before the Civil War probably stabled his horse in a backyard shed, but a later street railway fi lled stables with hundreds of horses. In leisure applications of the horse, growing urban elites increased the number of privately owned trotters but probably kept them in large boarding or livery stables, rather than small backyard ones. Bureaucracies now controlled horses, once managed by individuals, especially as the ownership and driving functions became separated. As the number of horses on public streets grew, so did the need for control on behalf of the public.20

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Tools Innovators transformed the vehicles (or tools, if we think of the horses as workers) that horses pulled. Before the horse revolution of the 1850s, a small number of one-horse, two-wheeled carts dominated urban freight transport. Carts had technical limitations: they were slow, especially since cities usually required that their horses be led by hand, and they held fewer goods than even one-horse wagons, but they were lighter, more durable, and easier to maneuver. They remained an important element of freight traffic as late as 1890.21 One carter, Isaac Lyon, published reminiscences. He held a casual, even cruel att itude toward his horses, whom he apparently did not even name. He once owned an old horse that had become nearly immobile, even when whipped. He brought the twenty-year-old to an auctioneer who dyed him, dosed him with pepper to make him livelier, and sold him as a nineyear-old for thirty dollars. The horse died three days later.22 Wagons took over from carts mainly because iron for wearing parts on the more complex vehicles became better and cheaper. One typical early builder claimed that one horse could pull five tons at five miles per hour with his prototype wagon, doubling a cart’s capacity. Especially during the Civil War, standardized parts and near assembly-line techniques significantly reduced wagon prices.23 By 1880, they had triumphed; the National Livestock Journal claimed that two Percherons with a heavy four-wheeled truck could pull more than four one-horse, two-wheeled carts.24 Precise data on intra-urban freight and horses are hard to fi nd. Clearly horses became indispensable. In 1796, Boston had just twenty carriages and eighty carts. The city had over 4,000 horses in 1860 and 14,000 twenty years later. In 1840, 370 Bostonians earned their living driving horses; in 1860, 4,501; in 1900, 11,321. After that, growth was much slower, peaking at around 15,000 in 1910. In 1875, the Chicago Tribune estimated that 3,700 horses in the 231 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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city pulled passengers, mostly on street railways and hacks, and 21,300 pulled freight.25 Between 1850 and 1860, the number of teamsters in the United States more than doubled. Between 1870 and 1900, the number of teamsters in New York City grew by 311 percent; in Chicago, by 675.5 percent; in Philadelphia, by 350.7 percent; in St. Louis, by 243.8 percent; in Boston, by 412.6 percent; and in Baltimore, by 157.6 percent. In each case, the number of teamsters and, presumably, of horses was growing at triple the rate of the human population.26 Specialized vehicles also became more common. Cities began to switch from human-pulled to horse-pulled fi re engines in the 1840s, usually over the objections of fi remen, who took masculine pride in dragging engines to fi res themselves.27 Other extraordinary refi nements in heavy trucks followed, including the fi rst iron-sided vehicle, the paddy wagon, invented in 1837 by the Parisian Paul-Henri Guillot.28 By 1874, Studebaker, the leading wagon maker, made fi ft y-four styles, mostly delivery wagons, some with glass sides to display their owners’ products (florists, for example, preferred this style). Studebaker’s catalog included street flushers, sprinklers, sweepers, and dumpers.29 The 1900 Census listed seventy-eight wagon types, mostly a variety of peddler’s and delivery vehicles, including insulated milk and ice trucks, furniture vans, laundry wagons, and lunch vans. Sears, Roebuck had reduced the price of its least expensive delivery wagon to $43.95. Better, cheaper wagons created more jobs for horses.30 The human-horse nexus was complex and less susceptible to mechanistic analysis. Large numbers of blacks and Irish Americans worked as teamsters in the North, and blacks drove mules in many southern cities. The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture notes that southern whites believed that blacks could read mules’ thoughts. Even in a northern city like Pittsburgh in 1911, more than half the teamsters were black. The Providence street railway assigned black horses to blacks. By 1880, more than half of Boston’s teamsters were Irish, as were disproportionately large numbers elsewhere. The Irish, too, were believed to have “mysterious and telepathic” communication with horses. Clearly employers deemed animal-human bonding important. The real world, of course, was likely different. Both groups came from horse-raising rural areas, so they had the appropriate knowledge. Blacks went into teaming because they had the relevant skills, entry costs were low, and they relished the opportunity to be more independent than in most jobs. The Irish background was likely similar.31 Employer regulations show the difficult working conditions for horses. Owners often held teamsters responsible for lameness or heat stroke. Wells 232

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The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City

Fargo, for one, gave elaborate instructions about watering and feeding horses (most wagons carried some oats and a feedbag). The company asked drivers to avoid public troughs, a potential source of disease, so they carried buckets and fi lled them wherever they could. Drivers had to deal with injured horses and raise fallen ones (put a blanket under the animal’s feet and “induce it to arise,” said the Wells Fargo manual helpfully). They were also responsible for putt ing blankets on horses in cold or rainy weather.32 Training horses for city life was a difficult and important part of teaming since it involved overcoming deeply held instincts. The fi rst instruction in one manual was: “Watch for objects likely to alarm your horse.” Even a flying piece of paper could scare a horse, especially since their instinct was to watch the scenery to the side (to help navigate a return), rather than the road.33 Other handbooks recommended singing or whistling to horses to calm them. Blinders fi rst appeared in the 1850s, an obvious adaptation to urban life. Yearlings still on the farm were often pastured next to railroad lines to socialize them to big city noises. Accidents were common, especially in traffic. In New York City, nineteenth-century horse-drawn vehicles caused more accidents per vehicle than motor vehicles later.34 Mastering two horses and a wagon required more skill than a one-horse cart. If one horse slacked, the other was overworked. Also, in turning, the outside horse worked harder and was especially prone to shying or running away. It made sense to harness the “more nervous” horse to the right, away from traffic. The reins had to be held fi rmly enough to give the horses a sense of control, but not so tightly as to make the horse insensitive to changes in pressure. Drivers could select from dozens of differently shaped bits, depending on the physiognomy and temperament of each horse. One manual described the choices as depending on the “lightness of driver’s hands” and “lightness of horses’ mouth.” Another gave seventeen different methods for holding the reins. Bit control was fundamental, but often four reins were in one hand, leaving the other free for the whip. The prescriptive literature was inconsistent. Warnings were constant, but often contradictory: Wells Fargo told drivers, “Always feel the horse’s mouth,” and “always keep a tight rein.” A Chicago street railway warned drivers against excessive pulling of bit and reins, which could ruin a horse. It wanted animals controlled primarily by voice and whip. Another Chicago street railway wanted one hand on the reins, the other on the brake.35 Surviving fi lms of horse-dominated streets show drivers staring straight ahead (the strong point of human vision), leaving happenings to the side to horses, who had better peripheral vision.36 Each relied on the other species’ strong point. Smooth handling was vital, since abrupt starts and stops could 233

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damage freight and passengers. Moreover, they played havoc with legs, the weakest part of the equine machine. Learning to control larger teams was more complex—four horses usually required a whip to balance the workload, but that meant eight reins had to be held in the left hand, a difficult skill.37 The City of Boston deemed four-horse teams so dangerous that their use required the permission of the Board of Aldermen.38 More rarely teamsters directed still larger teams, helped by riders on lead horses. Perhaps the largest team ever was the forty horses pulling 9,000 feet of wire cable weighing 12.5 tons for a Chicago cable railway. Street Railway Journal reported: “Forty whips were raised in mid-air; forty drivers uttered oaths of colossal proportions; forty horses felt the lash, and the North Side cable began to be threaded.”39 Large teams also hauled heavy loads in the iron industry and pulled heavy stone monuments. Fire horses required special training. They had to run to a spot under their harness, wait patiently for it to be dropped from the ceiling and hitched, gallop away, then stand quietly while a fi re raged nearby. Most fi re engines required more than two horses because of their weight (often over 8,000 pounds). Drivers trained fi re horses so well that when they aged and were sold for new tasks, like pulling cabs, their new owners sometimes could not stop them from running to their old fi re house at the sound of an alarm.40 Policemen had a somewhat different problem. They were among the few individuals who rode horses in cities. They trained horses to be “well-bitted, bridle-wise and leg-wise” (that is, steerable by leg pressure). Mounted police taught their horses to use six gaits, switch leads, angle off runaways, and slow down to push crowds sideways, a training process that could take six months.41 Police horses had to be quite phlegmatic, not bothered by loud noises or other tumults. One famous horse in Pittsburgh was trained to hold arrestees’ wrists in his mouth fi rmly enough to keep them from running away, but without breaking their skin.42 Braking, especially with heavy loads, presented problems. The Providence street railway company prohibited the application of brakes on hills, ordering drivers to pull reins, despite the obvious stress on legs. The same fi rm required that horses be taken out of harness during downhill runs in icy weather, expecting the driver to lower the car by brakes alone. A street railway management manual warned that drivers should dismount and walk their horses around curves and in front of schools, suggesting braking problems. Some street railways just banned all stops on hills, fearing that downhill cars would overrun their horses and uphill cars would be unable to restart.43 Large corporations worried about teamsters, fearing that cruelty or ne234

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The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City

glect would damage their valuable capital goods. One company charged human employees “to know every horse as a mother knows her child.”44 Another reminded drivers: “Don’t forget he is a sentient being and can feel the lash of either your whip or your tongue.45 One teamster was told on his fi rst day on the job: “Animals are a lot like people. Each of these horses has a different personality, but all of them need tender, loving care. . . . Animals always remember the people who treat them right.”46 Owners tried other techniques to create bonds of affection between both species of workers, even though they viewed horses as machines, an obvious paradox. They required teamsters to groom their horses, a form of bonding in nature.47 They encouraged drivers to name their horses, humanizing them. Boston’s work horses included Houyhnhnm (whose name derived from that of the horses that were more intelligent than humans in Gulliver’s Travels), Grief, John Wesley (after a preacher), Foreordination, Hayes (after a U.S. president), Tilden (after a presidential candidate), Richard II (after the English king whom Shakespeare portrayed as dying in batt le for want of a horse), Major, Jumbo (after the famous circus elephant), and Russell Sage (after a millionaire).48 One teamster published a poem in the union newspaper that anthropomorphized horses as “co-partners” to working men. All this suggests that owners and teamsters sometimes perceived their horses as companions, as well as machines. Th is kind of bonding had practical benefits in traffic. If twenty drivers cried confl icting orders on a crowded street, it was important that each horse distinguish his driver from others. Commands to horses could vary with each teamster-horse pair. The bonding probably worked both ways. We have not encountered an account of a teamster strike where strikers mistreated horses, although they rarely hesitated to sabotage other property. In one case, striking teamsters allowed feed wagons to cross picket lines into the stable.49 Striking Seatt le teamsters demanded that horse feedings be increased.50

Cruelty Objectively, how much cruelty was there? Even accepted practices were inherently cruel—yanking on bits hurt, braking did pull horses to excessively sharp stops, and hauling heavy weights could be exhausting. So, some cruelty was needed to make cities work, but excessive cruelty seems commonplace, if measured by formal legislation, pressure from quasi-public anticruelty groups, rules by employers, and even admonitions from teamster groups. Surely they were reacting to something. Those implicated never defended 235

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sadism, per se, other than the exigency of the moment such as the need to deliver goods on schedule or train a horse properly. While many fi rms asked their drivers to avoid the whip, it was still routine equipment. As late as 1912, one stable management manual recommended lighting a fi re under horses to start heavy loads.51 One of the scariest moments in American literature appears in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep.52 David, the novel’s eleven-year-old protagonist, has been unable to prevent some drunks from stealing milk from his father’s delivery wagon. When the always-choleric father returns, he reaches for the whip. For one terrifying moment, David is sure that he will be the target of his father’s rage. Instead, the old man takes his frustration out on the family horse. Nineteenth-century streets were fi lled with scenes like this—rage seems to have been a constant emotion, although, according to one history of anger, it was then in decline.53 Our reading of corporate and labor sources also suggests that anger directed at horses was becoming less acceptable. Still, it remained. Horses, just like physically weaker family members, were sometimes victimized. Angry, intemperate teamsters, excessively greedy owners, or wealthy, leisurely horse “lovers” seeking the perfect gait, the perfect posture, or the perfectly shaped tail did mistreat animals. One anticruelty group tracked its prosecutions for cruelty. Driving animals that were lame or had sores or beating were the most common causes. Also, horses suffered more in cold or rainy weather, and heat stroke increased mortality in the summer. One sign of decline in the acceptability of rage was the creation of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in New York City in 1866, an organization that spawned imitators elsewhere. The wealthy Manhattan socialite Henry Bergh modeled the new organization after older groups in London and Paris. Bergh and several other directors had been abolitionists before the Civil War and would later be involved in groups to prevent cruelty to children. The early directors were prominent members of New York City elite society, many of them with investments in transportation fi rms with large herds. Their exact motivation is hard to sort out. On the one hand, they seem to be part of a continuous reform process that sought to improve humans by limiting cruelty, thus the backward linkage with abolition and forward linkage to preventing child and spousal abuse makes sense—this may have been the next achievable reform. In many cities, women reformers participated actively, an early example of their emergence in politics. On the other hand, activists may have been romantic, transcendentalist lovers of nature such as Frederick Law Olmsted. The ASPCA did not lack a class agenda, and much effort seemed to be di236

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The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City

rected at restraining working-class violence in general by going after it when directed toward workhorses. Its activities suggest a fight over public space, with the owners of corporate herds seeking control of workers and others seeking to make public spaces less violent and more comfortable.54 Paris provided the model in many ways. Kathleen Kete notes that the Parisian bourgeoisie, especially women who were appalled at working-class violence during revolutionary outbursts, sought to restrain cruelty directed at animals, believing it to be a prelude to cruelty directed at humans.55 Arrested teamsters argued that owners should be prosecuted, not them, usually claiming that owners had given them ill-fed or lame horses and insisted that they extract too much work from them. One told Bergh, “I licked him [the horse] because he was unable to stand up and the company has no mercy on either the driver or the horses—and I must make time.”56 Drivers for fi rms demanding exact on-time delivery often had no recourse left but heavy whipping or other cruel practices such as shoving a sharp stick up the animal’s anus, or twisting his tail. One teamster quoted his boss: “God damn you, buy whips and I will buy horses. When he is dead, I will give you another one.”57 The ASPCA often served the commercial interests of large herd owners. Humanitarian rhetoric concealed a vital economic function. For example, Bergh’s agents would shoot lame horses (ironically, the society soon became the leading killer of horses in New York City), making it easier for owners to fi le claims with insurance companies that might have refused to pay if the beneficiary had shot the animal. Agents also shot sick animals before they could spread disease to other stables. Nor did most owners want their stock abused by their human employees. Large companies could hardly have had inspectors everywhere, so the ASPCA helped protect their valuable animals by enforcing anticruelty laws. In a sense, the owners were capitalizing on Victorian sentimentality. Herd owners welcomed ASPCA inspections. In 1919, an official of the National Biscuit Company told the Allegheny County Humane Society: “We have a good deal of money invested in horse flesh and we surely appreciate the cooperation of the Humane Society in helping us see that our horses are handled in a humane manner in the street.”58 The Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals may have summarized the relations between employers and drivers best: “If the men are on good terms with the employer, the horses are usually well treated, whereas if the men are dissatisfied, the horses are always badly treated.”59 Early in the twentieth century, anticruelty crusaders turned to more positive reinforcement, holding annual workhorse parades in cities, beginning in 237

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Boston in 1903.60 These often became major civic events, with thousands of spectators. Individual teamsters received ribbons for carefully groomed animals. After Boston’s 1919 parade, the president of the dairy fi rm H. P. Hood estimated that parades saved him one thousand dollars a year because stable hands and drivers hoping for a ribbon took better care of horses. Outing Magazine reported, “Another employer . . . reports that his horses have increased in value $25 or $30 apiece as a direct result of the stimulus afforded by the parades.”61 Profit trumped benevolence. Although they complained sporadically, local humane societies seldom went after cruel forms of upper-class horse fashion, such as polo, docking (cutt ing tails short for cosmetic reasons thereby limiting the ability of horses to swat fl ies), and check reins. The Pittsburgh society, however, did win a major court case in 1889 with a ruling that docking and check reins, which held their heads in an artificially high position, a fashionable look, were inherently cruel.62

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What Did Horses Th ink? Of course, we can not tell directly what horses thought, any more than we can discern the thoughts of any other group of urban workers who left behind no written record, but their behaviors nevertheless leave impressions. The geographer Chris Philo notes that animals have their own culture and also engage in resistance to and transgression of authority. The evolutionary track taken by horses provided running away as a defense mechanism, along with shying, rearing, and, for mules, freezing. Neighbors complained about the constant stamping, whinnies, and neighs from urban stables as “incessant noise.” In nature, these are signs of distress.63 Stampedes, although rare, were the most spectacular form of resistance. In New York, in 1896, many horses in a sales stable escaped and stampeded down Twenty-fourth Street, trampling four bystanders. In 1861, more than one thousand horses ran through Washington, D.C., after a fi re in a military depot, and five thousand escaped from the same stable in 1863.64 Lone runaways were more usual. A search of the online Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1841 to 1902 found 1,599 stories about “runaways.” A search for “runaway” in the online New York Times drew 4,381 hits. These events often cost human or equine lives. Most stories employed the term runaway metaphorically, applying it especially to wives and children. By itself, such constant metaphorical usage echoes a familiar and feared phenomenon that

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The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City

upset the expected order of urban life. In other words, runaways suggested a loss of control, a much-valued commodity in the Victorian city.

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Horses and the Built Environment With hindsight, it is obvious that municipalities planned street systems around horses. The needs of equine power determined much street design. Sidewalks, increasingly common in the 1850s, allowed the separation of pedestrian and horse. In the mid-nineteenth century, municipalities began to grade and pave streets to facilitate cleaning up after horses. Paving (including street rails) allowed smoother travel for transport, whether by omnibus, street railway, wagon, or carriage. The macadam, gravel, brick, and stone blocks fi rst laid in the 1850s served horses admirably by reducing the friction on the wheels that they pulled, and by providing grooves between the blocks that could be gripped by the calks (cleats) on horseshoes. Th is was especially helpful on hills. Ultimately, stone proved too hard on horses’ legs and too expensive to clean, so by the end of the nineteenth century, asphalt began to supplant it. Asphalt was softer, smoother, and, most importantly, easier to clean.65 Housing for horses set a number of precedents for human housing. In Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, where development began in 1858, restrictive covenants limited stables to one street, an early form of zoning. Some of the fi rst fi re codes required fi re doors, brick walls, and building sprinklers in stables.66 As early as 1871, before it was required for human habitations, New York City mandated that stable drains be connected to sewers.67 Street plans also changed to suit horses. Since wagons found it difficult to navigate turns sharper than ninety degrees, cities not only built wider streets in the age of the horse, they also used ninety-degree turns whenever possible. New York and other cities planned such gridiron streets for future growth long before sett lement.68 Cities began to enforce one-way traffic on older, narrower streets long before the automobile traffic became an issue. Ways that were wide enough to allow two pedestrians (or even two carts) to pass were not wide enough to allow two teams to pass, especially after sidewalks were added to an older street. Perhaps the most spectacular and enduring urban public works of the age of the horse were the broad avenues, parkways, and park drives built to allow the urban bourgeoisie to display their high-status horses and carriages. Here the model was the curvilinear paths of London’s parks and the boulevards of

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Baron Haussmann’s Paris. American examples abound, notably in the roads planned by Frederick Law Olmsted, one of whose collaborators called him “the American Haussmann.”69 Olmsted is best remembered for Central Park in Manhattan, which he designed in a manner making it possible for wealthy New Yorkers to show off their trott ing horses.70 It pioneered such road-building techniques as macadam pavement, curbstones, grade separation, and limited access. But in addition to romantically designed curvilinear parkways on the Central Park model—for instance, Boston’s Fenway—Olmsted built more Parisian-style boulevards, such as Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn; Lincoln Parkway, Buffalo; and Southern Parkway; Louisville. All his roads were horse-friendly, with sweeping turns and long stretches that horses could take at a gallop or, more likely, a trot. All were wide enough to allow passing and two-directional traffic. Many had separate lanes for slower traffic. In a complex process, these widely imitated boulevards would evolve into the modern limited-access highway. Thus, in many ways that seem obvious in retrospect, the horse made possible the daily operations of the nineteenth-century American city and left a heritage that still marks our built environments. The transit and local freight industries relied on biological power.

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Notes 1. United States Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920 (Washington, D.C., 1923), 123; Gijs Mom and David Kirsch, “Technologies in Tension: Horses, Electric Trucks, and the Motorization of American Cities, 1900–1925,” Technology and Culture 42.3 (2001): 489–518. 2. Jennifer R. Wolch, “Zoopolis,” in Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands, ed. Wolch and Jody Emel (London and New York, 1998), esp. 119; Glen Elder, Jennifer R. Wolch, and Jody Emel, “Le pratique sauvage: Race, Place and the Human-Animal Divide,” in Animal Geographies, ed. Wolch and Emel, esp. 85; Carolyn Hodak, “Les animaux dans la cite: Pour une histoire urbaine,” Geneses 37 (December 1999): 156–69, esp. 162; and Chris Philo, “Animals, Geography and the City: Notes on Inclusions and Exclusions,” in Animal Geographies, ed. Wolch and Emel, esp. 60. We are indebted to Yvette Chin for translating Hodak. 3. On the social construction of technology (SCOT), a methodology used throughout this essay, see W. E. Bijker, “Social Construction of Technology,” International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2001), 15522–28. John M. Staudenmaier, the editor of Technology and Culture, has summarized its core thesis: “No technological design succeeds because it is the best design—it [that is, SCOT] defi nes technological success as contingent and inherently political” (“Rationality, 240 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City Agency, Contingency: Recent Trends in the History of Technology,” Reviews in American History 30.1 [2002]: 168–81). For a somewhat limited attack on SCOT, see Edward Constant II, “Reliable Knowledge and Unreliable Stuff,” Technology and Culture 40.2 (April 1999): 324–57. For extended debates on social constructionism, see the October 2000 and April 2002 issues of Technology and Culture. 4. Gijs Mom, “Competition and Coexistence: Motorization of Land Transportation and the Substitution of the Horse,” paper presented at International Association for the History of Traffic Transport and Mobility Conference, 2002. 5. Anne N. Greene, “War Horses: Equine Technology in the American Civil War,” in Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History, ed. Susan R. Schrepfer and Philip Scranton (New York and London, 2004), 143, 161. 6. Edward Russell, “The Garden in the Machine: Toward an Evolutionary History of Technology,” introduction to Industrializing Organisms, ed. Schrepfer and Scranton, 1–16, esp. 1–2. 7. Jason Hribal, “‘Animals Are Part of the Working Class’: A Challenge to Labor History,” Labor History 44.4 (2003): 435–53. 8. “For a Horse Power for Propelling Machinery,” Journal of the Franklin Institute 11 (1833): 36; Louis C. Hunter and Lynwood Bryant, The Transmission of Power, vol. 3 of A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 28–29; Brooke Hindle, Technology in Early America: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill, 1966), 120–21. 9. The Memoirs are cited in Eugene S. Ferguson, “The Measurement of the ‘ManDay,’” Scientific American 225 (October 1971): 76–97, esp. 77. William Youatt , The Horse; with a Treatise on Draught (London, 1838), 403–52; and Andre Guillerme, Batir la ville: Revolutions industrielles dans les materiaux de construction FranceGrande Bretagne (1760–1840) (Paris, 1995), 128–29. 10. Asa Briggs, The Power of Steam: An Illustrated History of the World’s Steam Age (Chicago, 1982), 58; Eugene S. Ferguson, “The Steam Engine before 1830,” in Technology in Western Civilization, ed. Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell Jr., 2 vols., 1:245-63 (New York, 1967). 11. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, 1990), 3; Hunter and Bryant, A History of Industrial Power, 3:122–24; Richard L. Hills and A. J. Pacey, “The Measurement of Power in Early Steam-Driven Textile Mills,” Technology and Culture 13 (1972): 25–43. 12. Frederick John Jervis-Smith, Dynamometers (New York, 1915), 8–9. 13. Ellwood Morris “On the Tractive Power of the Horse,” Journal of the Franklin Institute (August 1839): 26–28, esp. 28; R. H. Thurston, “The Animal as a Prime Mover,” pt. 1, “The Human Animal as a Vital Prime Mover and a ThoughtMachine; The Energetics of the Vital Machine; Its Transformation”; pt. 2, “Energy Supplied; Power and Efficiency; Internal Work of the Vital Machine,” Journal of the Franklin Institute 139 (January–February 1895): 1–19, 100–121. 14. Quoted in J. Kenneth Major, Animal-Powered Engines (London, 1978), 12. 241 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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clay mcsh a ne a nd joel a. ta r r 15. “Motive Power,” Transactions of the American Institute, Proceedings of the Polytechnic Association (1860): 539. 16. Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 20. 17. Robert Thurston, The Animal as a Machine and a Prime Mover (New York, 1894), 37. 18. Susan D. Jones, Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America (Baltimore and London, 2003), 3. 19. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 174. 20. For the increase of “control” in general in nineteenth-century technological cultures, see Miriam Levin, Cultures of Control (Amsterdam, 2000); and Phillip Thurtle, “Breeding and Training Bastards: Distinction Information and Inheritance in Gilded Age Trott ing Horse Breeding,” in Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information, ed. Robert Mitchell and Phillip Thurtle, 65–86 (New York, 2004). 21. Based on an examination of illustrations in the Boston City Directory and in I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 6 vols. (New York, 1958). 22. Isaac Lyon, Recollections of an Old Cartman (1872; New York, 1984), 13, viii. 23. A. B. Allen, “Advantage of Increased Power and Greater Size in the Horse for City Work,” National Livestock Journal 12 (November 1881), 487; Donald L. Berkebile, Carriage Terminology: An Historical Dictionary (Washington, D.C., 1978), 74; “Two Horse Wagons,” American Agriculturist 7 (1848): 32: Albert Russell Erskine, History of the Studebaker Corporation (South Bend, Ind., 1911), 19–21. 24. J. H. Klippert, “Size of Domestic Animals,” Annual Report of the State Board of Agriculture of Ohio (1863): 223–43; “The Rise and Development of the Carriage Building Industry in America,” Carriage Monthly 40 (April 1904): 100–104; U.S. Patent Office, Subject-matter Index of Patents for Inventions Issued by the U.S Patent Office from 1790 to 1873 (Washington, D.C., 1874); Youatt , The Horse, 443–44; Ezra M. Stratton, The World on Wheels; or Carriages (New York, 1878); William Louis Gannon, “Carriage, Coach and Wagon: The Design and Decoration of American Horse-Drawn Vehicles” (Ph.D. diss., Iowa State University, 1960); Museums at Stony Brook, Nineteenth-Century American Carriages: Their Manufacture, Decoration, and Use (Stony Brook, N.Y., 1987); and Thomas A. Kinney, The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America (Baltimore, 2004). 25. New York Coach-Maker’s Magazine (May 1862): 150; Gannon, “Carriage, Coach and Wagon,” 112; Clay McShane, “Gelded Age Boston,” New England Quarterly 74 (August 2001): 274–301 esp. 278; “Number and Value of Horses in Chicago,” National Livestock Journal 4 (January 1873): 8. 26. Lyon, Recollections, viii, 3–8, 43–49; McShane, Down the Asphalt Path, 33. 27. Mark Tebeau, Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800–1950 (Baltimore, 2003), 33–35, 121; Amy S. Greenberg, The Volunteer Fire Company in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1998), 155. 28. Ghislaine Bouchet, Le cheval de Paris de 1850 a 1914 (Geneva, 1993), 122. 242 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City 29. Stratton, World on Wheels, 442; Gannon, “Carriage, Coach and Wagon,” 71. 30. Sears, Roebuck and Co., Solid Comfort Vehicles (Chicago, 1913), 20; 1900 Census, as cited in “Statistics of the Carriage Industry,” Carriage Monthly (April 1904): 176–78, esp. 177. 31. “Mules,” in Charles Reason Wilson and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill, 1989), 511; Wage Earning Pitt sburgh (New York, 1914), 121; Scott Molloy, Trolley Wars: Streetcar Workers on the Line (Washington, D.C., 1996), 161; Edwin Valentine Mitchell, The Horse and Buggy Age in New England (New York, 1937), 123; Roland L. Freeman, The Arabbers of Baltimore (Centreville, Md., 1989), 5. 32. Wells Fargo and Co., Rules and Instructions for Drivers (San Francisco: Wells Fargo and Co., 1902 and 1914), n.p. 33. Garland, The Private Stable, 578. 34. Reginald S. Timmis, Modern Horse Management (Toronto and New York, 1921), 44; John Gilmer Speed, The Horse in America (New York, 1905), 46; New York City, Annual Reports of the Board of Health (1870–1890). 35. Edward L. Anderson and Price Collier, Riding and Driving (New York, 1905), 16, 316, 365; Belle Beach, Riding and Driving for Women (New York, 1912), 265–67; Ware, Driving, 56, 62–68, 98–104; Wells Fargo and Co., Rules and Instructions for Drivers (1902), n.p.; W. E. Partridge, “Rudiments of Driving,” Street Railway Journal 3 (November 1886): 16–17, esp. 16; Augustine Wright, American Street Railways: Their Construction, Equipment and Maintenance (Chicago, 1888), 122. 36. See “American Memory” Web site, Library of Congress. 37. Anderson and Collier, Riding and Driving, 318. 38. The Charter and Ordinances of the City of Boston (1856), 101. 39. Forty Horses Unwinding a Cable Rope,” Street Railway Journal 3 (December 1887): 1040. 40. The New York City Fire Department claimed that it could harness a horse in 8.5 seconds (Social Statistics of Cities, 1880 Census, vol. 17, n.p.). See also Firefighters and Their Friends (New York, 1907), 11, 95; and Edward Edwards, History of the St. Louis Fire Department (St. Louis, 1916), 199–206. 41. Edwin Emerson, “Making Policemen of Horses,” Harper’s Weekly 53 (30 January 1909): 27–28. 42. Stefan Lorant, Pitt sburgh: The Story of an American City (Lenox, 1964), 177. 43. Alexander Easton, A Practical Treatise on Street or Horse-Power Railways (Philadelphia, 1859), 105; Wright, American Street Railways, 116, 177; Molloy, Trolley Wars, 119; City Work Horses, Bulletin 173 (Storrs, Ct., 1931), 10; Anderson and Collier, Riding and Driving, 135–37. 44. Molloy, Trolley Wars, 116. 45. Allegheny County Humane Society (ACHS), First Annual Report (1874), 30. 46. Freeman, The Arabbers of Baltimore, 9. 47. Almost all urban horses were geldings whose bonding instincts had been 243 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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clay mcsh a ne a nd joel a. ta r r confused by castration. Mares rarely worked in cities, being more valued for their reproductive labor. 48. Boston Work Horse Parade Association, Seventh Annual Report (1909), 113–14; “Various Vehicles,” Stable 2 (July 1987): 112. For “co-partners,” see Timothy F. Kruse, “Teamsters in the Gilded Age” (master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin– Madison, 1990), 2. 49. “How Horsecars Are Run,” Stable 2 (March 1887): 28–29. 50. Molloy, Trolley Wars, 120–21. 51. Timmis, Modern Horse Management, 12. 52. Roth, Call It Sleep, 369, 378. 53. Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago, 1986), 31. The authors speculate, probably accurately, that capitalism required a “smiling shopkeeper’s personality,” since the factory system can’t operate amid intense worker rage. 54. For example, Western Pennsylvania Humane Society, Forty-second Annual Report (1915). 55. Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley, 1994), 2. See also Bouchet, Le cheval de Paris, 177–86; and Dorothee Brantz, “Stunning Bodies: Animal Slaughter, Judaism, and the Meaning of Humanity in Imperial Germany,” Central European History 35 (June 2002): 2. 56. According to a letter that Bergh sent the teamster’s employer (10 September 1866, ASPCA Files, New York City). 57. Eleventh Annual Report of the Board of Mediation and Arbitration (New York, 1898), as quoted in Kruse, “Teamsters in the Gilded Age,” 81. 58. ACHS, Forty-third Annual Report (1919), 20. 59. Boston Work Horse Parade Association, Seventh Annual Report (1909), 5. 60. Bernard Oreste Uni, “The Quality of Mercy: Organized Animal Protection in the United States, 1866–1930” (Ph.D. diss., American University, 2002), 443. 61. Paul Pinkerton Foster, “Helping the Work Horses,” Outing 53 (May 1919): 168–79. 62. ASPCA, Twenty-fifth Annual Report (1899), 5. 63. Chris Philo, “Animals, Geography and the City,” 52; Katherine Albro Houpt, Domestic Animal Behavior for Veterinarians and Animal Scientists (Ames, Iowa, 1991), 21; Albert H. Buck, A Treatise on Hygiene and Public Health (New York, 1871), 392. 64. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 25 January 1896; Washington Star, 26 December 1861; New York Times, 13 December 1863. 65. Clay McShane, “La construzione sociale della strade in America,” in Asfalto: Il carattere della citta, ed. Mirko Zardini (Milan, 2003), 57–61; Gijs Mom, “Interartifactual Technology Transfer: Road Building Technology in the Netherlands and the Competition Between Bricks, Macadam, Asphalt and Concrete,” History and Technology 20.1 (March 2004): 75–96. 244 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City

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66. Street Railway Journal 5 (January 1888): 16; Street Railway Journal 5 (July 1889): 264. 67. Buck, Treatise on Hygiene, 94. 68. On grids, see Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven and London, 1995), 510; and John Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton, N.J., 1965), passim. 69. Calvert Vaux to Frederick Law Olmsted, May 22, 1865. 70. Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, 1992), 211–12, 245.

2 45 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

“Poor Dumb Brutes” or “Friends in Need”? Animals and River Floods in Modern Germany and the United States

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On 25 January 1937, Elsa Odman left Chicago to report for duty in Evansville, Indiana. Two days later, together with nine of her fellow Red Cross nurses, she boarded a U.S. Naval Reserve boat that went up the Ohio River. The boat was an open one, as she explained in a letter to her supervisor, Charlotte Heilman, but the Red Cross had provided “a good supply of blankets and we surely needed them, as it was very cold on the river.”1 The current was so swift that they sometimes progressed only a single mile in an hour. After an overnight stay at Menburg and another eight hours of travel on the following day, they reached their fi rst destination: Owensboro, Kentucky. Odman was impressed by what she had witnessed during her trip: “It was a sight one will never forget as the boat scarcely moved up the river. We met houses, barns, etc., floating down the stream.”2 Her trip, however, wasn’t over yet. Since she had been assigned to Stanley, Kentucky, she transferred to a small motor boat and sailed “merrily” for another eight miles “over fences, railroad tracks and trees” until she fi nally arrived at St. Peter’s Catholic Church Priest Home, which was now located on a twenty-acre island. There she found “two hundred head of stock, several horses and mules, many pigs and about fi ft y dogs,” who all belonged to the farms that were now underwater. It was pitiful to hear them, she noted, since everybody knew that they were hungry. One morning, “our dogs became quite vicious and Sisters had quite a time . . . when they started for Mass, as one of them growled and bared his teeth. One sister threw him a piece of 246

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“Poor Dumb Brutes” or “Friends in Need”?

meat before they dared venture out.” It was only after Father Bowling had managed to organize some feed for the animals that the island became more peaceful.3 As Odman’s account makes perfectly clear, natural catastrophes such as river floods challenge not only the dominant power relations within a society but also call into question the seemingly natural relationship between humans and animals. Human victims of disaster as well as the relief forces sent to aid them are often disturbed to see species domesticated for centuries turn into vicious “monsters” obeying their natural instincts for survival rather than their mistresses’ or masters’ voices.4 On the other hand, animals and humans seem to share a similar fate in times of emergency. Both are driven from their usual surroundings; both may fi nd themselves being cared for in large camps; and, more often than not, both are dependent on outside help. However, animals are in many respects much more vulnerable to floods than humans, and some of the chief causes of this discrepancy are anthropogenic. Focusing on the Rhine, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers, this essay will look at the fate of animals facing large floods during the past two centuries, especially in rural areas. “Natural” disasters, which for a long time were neglected by historians, are no longer viewed as “acts of God” but as originating in the interplay of societal structures and power relations with catastrophic events.5 While the literature on the history of disasters in general and on floods in particular is slowly but steadily growing, the effect of such calamities on animals has so far hardly been analyzed.6 One notable exception to this rule is John J. Audubon, who, unsurprisingly, had eyes (and ears) for the fate of animals during a flood. Traveling in a light canoe on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers at flood stage in 1832, he saw hastily manufactured rafts that had been tied to trees and served as refuges for humans, provisions, and catt le. He also witnessed the inversion of the order of the riparian fauna: bears, cougars, lynxes, and several other fourfooted predators had climbed to safety in the top branches of trees, where they waited for the water to recede. “Hungry in the midst of abundance, although they see floating around them the animals on which they usually prey,” he wrote, “they dare not venture to swim to them.” Even worse, those animals, exhausted by their attempts to reach dry land, were an easy target for hunters. “Some who have nothing to lose, and are usually known by the name of squatters,” Audubon reported, “take this opportunity of traversing the woods in canoes, for the purpose of procuring game, and particularly the skins of animals, such as the deer and bear, which may be converted into money.” 247

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Audubon complained that these squatters were destroying thousands of deer merely for their hides, while the flesh was left to putrefy. “On occasions like this, all these animals are shot by hundreds,” wrote the famous ornithologist, who himself had shot birds by the thousands.7

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Floodplains in their Natural State Floodplains in their natural state, such as those visited by Audubon, constitute a transition zone. Like the alpine tree line or the forest-prairie boundary, they separate as well as link two different ecosystems, in this case the aquatic and the terrestrial.8 At the same time, however, they form an ecosystem in its own right, which is characterized by the more or less regular inundation of the land by floodwaters. The fauna in the floodplain varies, mostly depending on such factors as amplitude, predictability, and frequency of water-level fluctuations. Terrestrial invertebrates in temperate regions, for example, are less well adapted to regular inundations than those in tropical regions. They therefore “show a predisposition to survive heavy disturbance” but prefer avoidance strategies when confronted with periodic flooding.9 In general, the conditions of the floodplain support a wide variety of species, including invertebrates in vast numbers; highly mobile animals such as spiders, which can easily escape floods; or aquatic species like the crawfish, which can avoid fatal dehydration by burrowing underground. The floodplain also provides a safe haven and important food sources for many semiaquatic and terrestrial species, and at flood stage it constitutes an important breeding and feeding area for many aquatic species. Furthermore, surface water “moderates temperature extremes in the floodplain and serves as an escape habitat for many animals.”10 While the regular, moderate inundation of the floodplain is the conditio sine qua non for this type of habitat, severe flooding can be devastating and in some cases can lead to the extinction of species in a given area. Extensive and prolonged floods in California and Oklahoma in the 1930s, for example, killed not just the herbaceous and shrubby vegetation; even some mammal populations were nearly eliminated.11 On the Amazon River, terrestrial invertebrates generally suffer drastic decreases in their population density following heavy floods or unusual droughts.12 Some animals, however, actually benefit from severe disturbances of other species’ habitats. During the 1993 Mississippi flood, for example, herons and egrets “had a field day, eating gar and other fish that ventured into shallow reaches of the littoral zone. The birds’ situations improved even more through the fall as the flood receded, 248 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

“Poor Dumb Brutes” or “Friends in Need”?

leaving behind large pools of trapped fish. And wood ducks had more places to hide from predators and to fi nd food for their young.”13

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Floodplain Invasion While extreme natural events such as floods certainly can have devastating effects on the population of certain species in the floodplains, human alterations of river systems have turned out to be much more important in affecting animal habitats in and along the waterways. Audubon—reflecting on a journey from Pennsylvania to Kentucky he had made in 1812—had already seen the first signs of the floodplains’ transformation by the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and commercialization. Everywhere along the Ohio, he observed new settlements and constantly heard the “din of hammers and machinery.” Woods were rapidly disappearing, and tremendously increased navigation and commerce claimed not only the rivers themselves but also “those almost uninhabited shores.” Nearly untouched by white sett lers in the eighteenth century, the Ohio Valley became a commercial highway within a couple of decades. “When I remember that these extraordinary changes have all taken place in the short period of twenty years,” Audubon wrote in 1832, “I pause, wonder, and, although I know all to be fact, can scarcely believe its reality.”14 Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, industrialization, urbanization, rapid population growth, and technological innovations had profound impacts on nature in general and on rivers in particular. The natural waterways acquired a plethora of new functions. Not only did they have to guarantee the flow of immensely increased navigation; they also had to supply drinking water for the urban masses, dispose of the waste generated by factories, and serve as an important source of energy. In order to better meet these demands, many rivers were straightened, reduced in length, bordered with levees, and harnessed into narrow channels.15 Hydraulic engineers sometimes openly reveled in “pushing rivers around.”16 The primary objective of these measures was the creation of a steady, predictable flow to satisfy continuously growing industrial, commercial, and agricultural needs, “a happy mean between low water and flood,” as the New York Times expressed it in 1895.17 In a functional sense, these changes proved successful. The price that had to be paid for the economic gains they enabled was, however, not just the transformation of many waterways into “techno-rivers” but an ever-increasing threat of flooding.18 The more economic wealth was concentrated behind the levees, the more imperative flood-control measures became. But since dikes, levees, floodwalls, and reservoirs could not guarantee complete protec249 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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tion, they created a false sense of security and even promoted the invasion of the floodplain.19 Draining and cutt ing off swamps; channeling, straightening, and narrowing rivers; as well as the erection of levees and floodwalls not only meant acquiring new lands for agricultural, residential, commercial, and industrial purposes; it also meant the disappearance of a large percentage of the natural floodplain. Just like social time in the factories, natural space was rationalized and homogenized. The Rhine, for example, lost 90 percent of its floodplain and was shortened by 105 kilometers (about 65 miles), its flow restricted to a uniform width.20 The transformation of the lowlands for agricultural purposes brought many domesticated animals into these areas, but with the loss of the floodplain, the river also lost most of its biodiversity: “Some species went extinct, while others just went away. A handful of species were able to take advantage of abandoned or new ecological-niches. But no part of the riparian population remained unaffected by the destruction and changes.”21 Thus many animals suffered less from floods than from flood control and other human interventions into the hydrological regime. Flood control was especially harmful when it came in the form of levees, floodwalls, and dikes. Today, on most of the highly industrialized and commercialized rivers such as the Rhine or the Ohio, only a few spots still serve as a refuge for biodiversity. Sometimes, however, biodiversity resulted from flood control rather than falling victim to it. Of the 221 wildlife refuges operated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Biological Survey in 1937, totaling 13,326,711 acres, 196 refuges involved water-impounding areas. Overall, 60 percent of the U.S. Biological Survey’s refuge area represented “restored water area.” Of the U.S. Biological Survey course, these reservoirs served more than flood-control purposes; they also functioned as power-generating storage basins or recreational facilities, or had been created to improve downstream navigation. Flood control, however, was involved in many of these projects. In the Upper Souris Migratory Waterfowl Refuge in North Dakota’s Renville and Ward counties, for example, a storage dam held up the waters of the Souris River and impounded up to 120,000 acre-feet. In addition to creating 60,000 acres of waterfowl-breeding marsh out of formerly drained land, this reservoir provided flood protection for several cities in the Souris River valley. According to J. Clark Salyer of the Biological Survey’s Division of Migratory Waterfowl, the storage basin would have averted all of the historic floods of this river except for the four biggest on record.22 In this case, flood-control measures established an artificial haven for nondomesticated animals.

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“Poor Dumb Brutes” or “Friends in Need”?

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Animals and Floods in the City Flood damages certainly manifest themselves most dramatically in the city, where factories are inundated; where thousands of people often have to get along without such essential services as gas, water, or electricity; and where the impairment and destruction of huge infrastructural facilities such as streets, bridges, and railroad tracks can paralyze intra- and intercity communication, sometimes for days or even weeks. The 1937 flood on the Ohio and Upper Mississippi rivers—one of the most devastating disasters in the history of the United States—was even worse than the Mississippi flood of 1927 since “this was a disaster attacking man where he was most vulnerable—in urban centers where human beings live crowded together,” as the American Red Cross pointed out.23 Cities, of course, concentrated not only humans but animals as well. In 1870, for example, 1.5 million of the 8.7 million horses in the United States could be found in areas that were described by the U.S. Census as “not on farms.” By 1900, almost 3 million horses were living in the cities, most of them being used for public and private transportation.24 Unsurprisingly, therefore, horses in the cities were also flood victims. Henry Ellsworth, writing about the 1913 flood in Dayton, Ohio, not only noted the 86,000 persons who had been in the bread line for two weeks—among them allegedly ten millionaires—or the 15,420 pianos and more than 26,000 clocks ruined during the flood. He also mentioned 1,427 dead horses and 2,000 other animals lying on the streets after the water had receded.25 One Colonel Zimmermann, who had been sent from Dayton into Hamilton, a city that also suffered from devastating losses caused by the flooding of the Miami River, wired in an official report that 91 human bodies would be interred the next day and that the carcasses of 200 horses were burned in the streets.26 The most striking example of how animals’ vulnerability to natural hazards in the city increased due to the urban occupation of the floodplain is certainly the zoo. When the Rhine River valley and most of its tributaries experienced the worst flood of the century in 1882–83, the city of Cologne was especially hard hit. Within three hours, the low-lying area between the Nippes and Niehl neighborhoods was submerged beneath ten feet of water.27 Unfortunately, the Cologne Zoo had been built exactly within this basin. The property was protected by a surrounding wall, but the flood turned out to be too strong and tore down parts of it. The animals, many of them trapped in their cages, were terrified as the waters rose in the parts of the zoo that were clos-

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est to the river. Several “valuable” species drowned, and the cost of damages sustained by the zoo’s owners, a joint-stock company, amounted to 50,000 Reichsmark. To some species, however, the flood meant not a life-threatening danger but an excellent opportunity to escape. Large numbers of waterfowl, for example, managed to flee the zoo through the breach in the wall.28 American zoos were also affected by floods. In 1936, 200 animals drowned in the Manchester (New Hampshire) Zoo. The only survivors were a pair of leopards and a bear.29 Th ree black bears in Pennsylvania’s Kingston Zoo were hardly better off when the Susquehanna River flooded in the same year. As the water rose in one of the animal houses, they “sat huddled together watching the boats wobble past and lift ing their heads in their conventional appeal for food,” as the New York Times reported.30 When confi ned in a zoo, even aquatic species can become vulnerable to a flood, as Hurricane Katrina made perfectly clear in 2005. Many of the 12,000 fish and animals at the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans died due to power outages triggered by the flood: “The generator, which provided the power to clean the tanks, supply air and regulate tank temperatures, became clogged, and when employees returned several days later they found 10,000 dead fish. Most of the animals that survived could breathe air, like penguins, otters and turtles. They were temporarily sent to other institutions.”31 Animals accustomed to living among people often lose their ability to survive in the wild, with their very existence dependent on the constant care provided by human keepers or owners. They thus become increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic events such as floods. When human society is required to cope with a disaster, animals are usually left to their own devices—devices that no longer suffice to deal with extraordinary circumstances.

Animals and Floods in Rural Areas Flood devastation in cities certainly drew more attention from newspapers and other media than did the sufferings of the farmers and their animals who were scattered throughout the countryside. In rural areas, small commercial and industrial establishments such as gristmills or dry-goods stores were affected by floods, too; but the damage pattern here was to a large extent characterized by agricultural losses. Most of the land that had been separated from the rivers was utilized not for urban dwellings or industrial establishments but for agricultural purposes. Floodplains usually offer fertile land that, due to its often gentle slope, is easily accessible by heavy machinery such as trac-

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“Poor Dumb Brutes” or “Friends in Need”?

tors.32 The downside to the agricultural potential of the floodplain was the more or less constant threat of flooding. Floods could—and often did—wash away the fertile topsoil of the land while depositing inches, sometimes feet, of mud on the fields and thus rendering them unproductive for a long time.33 Inundations in the countryside frequently damaged or swept away outbuildings, barns, smokehouses, fences, wagons, harnesses, and other costly farm implements and machinery. Most damaging, however, were feed, seed, and crop losses. Th roughout the bottoms of Knight and Union townships on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, for example, farmers lost their food supply for the rest of the year in the January 1937 flood. In addition, the seed for that year’s sowing was destroyed, as was the feed to take care of the livestock until the new crop. Furthermore, as the American Red Cross reported, “thousands of bushels of corn were ruined, representing the cash to pay taxes or the mortgage or to fi nance the spring planting.”34 During the flood of the Muskingum River basin in 1935, shocks of grain were seen floating down the main rivers at almost every point. Appraising the damages to crops on 914 farms in the basin after the flood, the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District noted that 20,589 acres out of a total of 88,835 acres had been inundated, amounting to crop damages of $573,606, or $27.87 per acre. The total crop loss in the basin was estimated at $3.5 million.35 Farm animals were an asset and a commodity to their owners, too, of course; and their deaths during a flood were therefore often described in commercial terms. Questionnaires sent out in the 1930s and 1940s by the U.S. Weather Bureau in an attempt to determine the annual U.S. flood damage, for example, asked for information regarding losses of “livestock and other movable property.”36 It is hardly surprising that these losses were analyzed in highly scientific terms, as Gilbert F. White did in his 1942 dissertation, which was published three years later as the seminal study Human Adjustment to Floods. Livestock losses, White explained, made up 8 percent of the total agricultural flood damage between 1934 and 1941, and were “especially responsive to differences in depth of flooding and in the rapidity with which crest is reached,” while the duration and season of flooding were relatively unimportant. “Valuation of livestock losses,” White continued, “as of all the remaining types of farm losses other than those to drainage and irrigation works and to land, presents no outstanding difficulties and lends itself to the market value or capital income methods.”37

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Rescue and Relief When confronted with floods, animals, like their human counterparts, often found themselves literally displaced and had to cope with the strangest situations. “I could relate hundreds of incidents,” Audubon wrote of the Ohio and Mississippi floods of 1832, “which might prove to you the dreadful effects of such an inundation, and which have been witnessed by thousands besides myself. I have known, for example, a cow swimming through a window elevated at least seven feet from the ground, and sixty-two above low-water mark.”38 The editor of the Free Enquirer, witnessing the same flood on a steamboat, reported similar phenomena. While he was passing farm after farm already under water, he saw “catt le stowed away in a boat which is moored half way up the barn.” One man had even built a hog pen on the roof of his flooded home, where he kept “three to four swine” and his fowls. The refuge was, however, apparently too small to provide a safe haven for all his animals: a couple of “fresh cowskins hanging above the door seemed evidence that the more unwieldly stock had (as an Irishman might express it) been slaughtered to save their lives.”39 After the devastating 1927 Mississippi flood, some citizens of Greenville found ratt lesnakes, frogs, cockroaches, and water bugs in their houses, while others had “continual fights with crayfish in the rooms where water remained.”40 Surrounded by water, animals were often trapped on small spots of dry land. “The water, which has been rising three inches a day,” reported Captain C. E. Whitney from his rescue mission along the Mississippi in 1882, “has washed away the scaffolding on which they stood and the animals are compelled to stand breast deep. They cannot long survive it.”41 Houses, bridges, elevated streets, and even levees—the very structures that were supposed to keep the waters away from the floodplain—often provided the last refuge for animals as well as humans.42 Th is was the case, for example, in 1927 after a crevasse occurred on the Mississippi near Vicksburg, when farmers drove their catt le and other animals to the nearest levee.43 During the rescue operations, however, many animals, especially dogs, had to be left behind in order to save humans. A local newspaperman gave the following report: “I heard many plead pitifully to be permitted to put their dogs in boats, but this was impossible, and I have seen dogs placed on a board or small rafts and sent off in the current yelping pitifully as they parted forever from their helpless masters who were forced to abandon the faithful animals.”44 Some animals were so disturbed by their new and confi ned environment that they tried to escape. Thus many mules drowned when they tried to return to their homes 25 4 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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“Poor Dumb Brutes” or “Friends in Need”?

and went into the river, only to be swept away by the current.45 Often the fauna on these artificial islands consisted of predators and prey. In 1993, one “conservation agent on an airborne survey mission near Columbia, Missouri, spotted a coyote on a levee flanked by Missouri River water. The coyote was just 100 yards from a buck, doe, and three fawns. The plane spooked them all and they passed each other running down the levee to get away.”46 The most obvious solution to save animals was to move them out of the inundated areas wherever that was possible. In 1882, large numbers of horses and mules were transferred from Concordia Parish near Natchez, Mississippi, to the hills after rumors spread that the Henderson-Ashley levee was giving way. Furthermore, all kinds of ships were utilized to rescue human and nonhuman flood refugees. According to one New York Times report, the steamer Charles Rebstock was kept constantly employed in moving people and stock. Another steamer, the Sallie Carney from Deer Creek, brought 350 “head of stock” to Vicksburg from a nearby plantation where the water stood seven to ten inches deep.47 In Concordia Parish, Louisiana, where 65 percent of the farmland was flooded by the Mississippi and Black rivers in 1937, 1,700 head of catt le were evacuated by barge to Hutchins’ Landing, Mississippi. Some farmers who had hoped that evacuation of their catt le could be avoided had stayed on their homesteads, but they, too, fi nally had to be boated out of the flooded districts.48 In the same year, the Red Cross set up special corrals to house thousands of animals that had been rescued from the flooded areas.49 The cities and towns on higher ground were soon overcrowded by the large numbers of human and animal “refugees.” In Natchez, “droves of stock” were constantly passing through the town during the 1882 Mississippi flood, as one observer noted.50 On Elsa Odman’s island in 1937, animals outnumbered humans by far. Originally, there had been 300 displaced humans, but most of them had chosen to go to Owensboro when a barge came to pick them up. The hundred or so who had remained had done so in order to take care of their livestock: “The men went out in boats and salvaged feed wherever they could fi nd it in barns that were in the water and so kept their stock fed.”51 In other parts of Kentucky, farmers were reluctant to move their stock, since they could not be convinced that the water would rise as high as it did—six feet over any previously recorded flood in this area.52 Livestock losses could be minimized, however, if efficient flood-warning systems were established, as was the case in northwestern Wisconsin, when several rivers flooded badly in 1941. Only a few animals died in the Lower Chippewa Valley because the inhabitants had been warned as early as seventy-two hours before the flood. 255

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The farmers thus had ample time to move their catt le to higher ground. Only in a few lake and swamp areas were animals trapped by the rising water.53 Deprived of their food supplies, most farmers encountered severe problems in feeding the large numbers of livestock in inundated areas, which forced them to look for alternatives. In 1882, all the willows along the Black River were stripped of their foliage for catt le feed, as Captain C. E. Whitney noted while traveling on the dispatch boat Susie B.54 “The continued care of farm stock is part of the work of rehabilitation,” wrote the managing editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal after the vast Mississippi flood in 1927. The Red Cross had not overlooked “the poor dumb brute,” he went on. In the Greenville district alone, the relief organization had to provide 100,000 pounds of grain and 175 tons of hay to feed 45,000 mules and 10,000 horses.55 Altogether, 271,000 animals were cared for by the Red Cross.56 Ten years later on the Ohio, the Red Cross’s agricultural rehabilitation program made “awards for catt le, mules, feed, seed, livestock and implements.”57

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Loss of Life In terms of the death toll, animals were and still are much more vulnerable to floods than humans. Although reliable totals of dead animals are often difficult to obtain and almost impossible to determine for wild animals, many contemporary accounts do convey the scale of the loss of life. In 1882, the loss of catt le between Belzona and Yazoo City was, according to a New York Times report, “beyond computation.”58 Th ree decades later, former president Theodore Roosevelt noted that the 1912 flood along the Mississippi River had “destroyed” catt le, horses, and hogs in large numbers, while the “wild animal life taken by the floods cannot be computed.”59 Floods on the same river in 1927 took the lives of 11,255 mules, horses, catt le, and hogs in a single county.60 Ten years later, when the Ohio River devastated large parts of Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio, the Red Cross estimated livestock losses to include 1,968 work animals; 3,354 catt le; 31,516 hogs; 243,282 chicken; and 11,425 animals of other kinds.61 In Bullitt County alone, which, according to the Red Cross, was known in Kentucky as a “pauper county,” the official estimate of loss was given as $1,710,500. The county farm agent counted 450 dead work animals; 2,500 head of catt le; 1,600 hogs; 4,200 chicken and other poultry; and 600 sheep. Furthermore, almost all of the corn and fodder in the county had been ruined.62 On the Yadkin River, thousands of birds lost their lives when the floodwaters swept away several commercial poultry houses.63 Animals also

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“Poor Dumb Brutes” or “Friends in Need”?

During the 1937 flood of the Ohio River, WPA workers buried more than three thousand large farm animals in mass graves. Sights such as this one, where a mule was discovered suspended in a tree 42 feet above ground on the farm of W. B. Terry in Louisville, were common during the most devastating flood that ever hit the Ohio Valley. The image indicates both the height of the water level and the vulnerability of animals to river floods. (CS 150 554, Caulfield and Shook Collection, Rare Books and Photographic Archives, University of Louisville)

suffered from what might be called “collateral flood damage.” On the Mississippi River in 1993, for example, many deer, raccoons, and other undomesticated animals who were trying to reach higher ground were killed by cars as they attempted to cross roads and highways.64

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Conclusion The vast transformation of many rivers and their floodplains in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries not only changed the land-use patterns in these areas and the character of riverine societies; it also changed the composition of the floodplain fauna. While biodiversity was generally lost, many farm animals (as well as pets) were transferred into the seemingly flood-proof lands behind the levees, where they were utilized largely for agricultural purposes. Unlike the many “indigenous” floodplain dwellers, who over time had developed strategies to cope with the periodic inundations of their habitat, the newcomers were unused to dealing with high water. Hence river floods and other natural catastrophes routinely triggered processes of “untaming” animals that had previously been accustomed to human presence, thereby revealing the limits of domestication.

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Notes 1. Elsa Odman, Madison Hotel, Madisonville, Ky., to Charlotte Heilman, Louisville, Ky., dated 5 March 1937, Folder “DR 735.11 Kentucky Counties, Hickman and Hopkins,” Box (B) 1264, Record Group (RG) 200, Records of the American Red Cross, DR 735 Ohio and Mississippi Valley Storm and Flood 1/37, National Archives, College Park, Md. (hereafter NA). 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. See Susanna M. Hoff man, “The Monster and the Mother: The Symbolism of Disaster,” in Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster, ed. Hoff man and Anthony Oliver-Smith, 113–41 (Santa Fe, N.M., and Oxford, 2002). 5. John C. Burnham, “A Neglected Field: The History of Natural Disasters,” Perspectives: The American Historical Association Newsletter 26 (4 April 1988): 22–24; Kenneth Hewitt , ed., Interpretations of Calamity from the Viewpoint of Human Ecology (Boston 1983); Ian Burton, Robert W. Kates, and Gilbert F. White, eds., The Environment as Hazard, 2nd ed. (New York, 1993); Susanna M. Hoff man and Anthony Oliver-Smith, “Anthropology and the Angry Earth: An Overview,” in The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective, ed. Hoff man and Oliver-Smith, 1–16 (New York and London, 1999), esp. 1. 6. Theodore Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (Oxford, 2000); Am Tag danach: Zur Bewältigung von Naturkatastrophen in der Schweiz, 1500–2000, ed. Christian Pfister (Bern, 2002); Dieter Groh, Michael Kempe, and Franz Mauelshagen, eds., Naturkatastrophen: Beiträge zu ihrer Deutung, Wahrnehmung und Darstellung in Text und Bild von der Antike bis ins 20. Jahr258 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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“Poor Dumb Brutes” or “Friends in Need”? hundert (Tübingen, 2003); Uwe Lübken, “Zwischen Alltag und Ausnahmezustand: Ein Überblick über die historiographische Auseinandersetzung mit Naturkatastrophen,” Werkstatt Geschichte 38 (December 2004): 55–64. 7. John J. Audubon, “A Flood of the Mississippi,” New York Mirror: A Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts, 9 February 1833. According to Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (New York, 2004), 74–75, “Audubon engaged birds with intensity (and sometimes the ferocity) of a hunter because hunting was the cultural frame out of which his encounter with birds emerged.” 8. See Melanie C. Beckmann, Franz Schoell, and Christoph D. Matt haei, “Effects of Increased Flow in the Main Stem of the River Rhine on the Invertebrate Communities of Its Tributaries,” Freshwater Biology 50 (2005): 10–26, esp. 10. 9. Joachim Adis and Wolfgang Junk, “Terrestrial Invertebrates Inhabiting Lowland River Floodplains of Central Amazonia and Central Europe: A Review,” Freshwater Biology 47 (2002): 711–31, esp. 723. 10. Mikko Saikku, This Delta, This Land: An Environmental History of the YazooMississippi Floodplain (Athens, Ga., and London, 2005), 46. See also C. T. Robinson, K. Tockner, and J. V. Ward, “The Fauna of Dynamic Riverine Landscapes,” Freshwater Biology 47 (2002): 661–77. 11. Lucille F. Stickel, “Observations on the Effect of Flood [sic] on Animals,” Ecology 29 (October 1948): 505–7, esp. 505. 12. See Adis and Junk, “Terrestrial Invertebrates,” 711. 13. William H. Allen, “The Great Flood of 1993,” Bioscience 43 (1993): 732–38, esp. 732. 14. John J. Audubon, “The Ohio,” Museum of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art 20.117 (1832): 334–35. See also Darrel E. Bigham, “River of Opportunity: Economic Consequences of the Ohio,” in Always a River: The Ohio River and the American Experience, ed. Robert L. Reid, 130–79 (Bloomington, Ind., 1991); and Kim M. Gruenwald, River of Enterprise: The Commercial Origins of Regional Identity in the Ohio Valley, 1790–1850 (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind., 2002). 15. On the Rhine River, see Christoph Bernhardt, “Zeitgenössische Kontroversen über die Umweltfolgen der Oberrheinkorrektion im 19. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 146 (1998): 293–319; and Marc Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000 (Seatt le, 2002), 35–36. 16. “Endless Frontier,” Time 58 (30 July 1951), quoted here from Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York and Oxford, 1993), 135. Worster refers to engineers of the Bureau of Reclamation in the 1950s. See also Leland R. Johnson, “Engineering the Ohio,” in Reid, ed., Always a River, 180–209. 17. “Vagaries of the Ohio,” New York Times, 24 November 1895. See also Cioc, The Rhine, 16. 18. Cioc, The Rhine, 14. 19. See H. Rutherford Platt, “From Flood Control to Flood Insurance: Chang259 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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u we lübk en ing Approaches to Floods in the United States,” Environments 27 (1999): 67–78; and Keith Smith and Graham Tobin, Human Adjustment to the Flood Hazard (London, 1979), 56. See also the chapter “Return of the Suppressed” in Steinberg, Acts of God. 20. See E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 56–97; and Cioc, The Rhine, 10–11, 16. 21. Cioc, The Rhine, 153. 22. “Statement of J. Clark Salyer, Representing the Biological Survey,” U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, 75th Cong., 1st sess., Hearings before the Committee on Flood Control on Levees and Flood Walls, Ohio River Basin, H.R. 7393 and H.R. 7647 (Washington, D.C., 1937), 265. Salyer failed to mention, however, how many species drowned during the process of creating these artificial lakes. 23. American Red Cross, The Ohio-Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1937: Report of Relief Operations of the American Red Cross (Washington, D.C., 1938), 17. 24. See Joel A. Tarr and Clay McShane, “Urban Horses and Changing CityHinterland Relationships in the United States,” in Resources of the City: Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe, ed. Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin, and Geneviève Massard-Guilbauld, 48–62 (Aldershot, U.K., and Burlington, Vt., 2005), esp. 48–49. 25. Henry Ellsworth, “Oberammergau,” in Dayton Flood Book Co., Dayton Flood (Dayton, Ohio, 1915), 13. For pictures of dead horses lying in a Dayton street, see Lest we Forget . . . , Observance of the 34th Anniversary of the 1913 Flood and the Work of the Miami Conservancy District. Sponsored by the Dayton Chamber of Commerce and a Committee of 100 Citizens (Dayton, Ohio, 1947), 10. See also A. H. Horton and H. J. Jackson, The Ohio Valley Flood of March–April 1913 (including Comparisons with Some Earlier Floods), Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, Water-Supply Paper 334 (Washington, D.C., 1913), plate 17; and Carl M. Becker and Patrick B. Nolan, Keeping the Promise: A Pictorial History of the Miami Conservancy District (Dayton, Ohio, 1988), 62. 26. Frederick E. Drinker, Horrors of Tornado, Flood, and Fire, Containing a Full and Thrilling Account of the Most Appalling Calamities of Modern Times (Philadelphia, 1913), 248. 27. “In Wassernoth,” Mühlheimer Zeitung, 2 December 1882. 28. Oberpräsident der Rheinprovinz von Bardeleben to Putt kamer, Koblenz, 13 December 1882, vol. 1, Nr. 53, Tit. 52, Rep. 77, I. HA, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. See also Denkschrift über die Rheinüberschwemmungen im Bezirke der Bürgermeisterei Longerich in den Monaten November und Dezember 1882 sowie Januar 1883 (Cologne, 1884), ibid., vol. 3; and Die Rhein-Ueberschwemmungen: Zur Erinnerung an die grossen Ueberschwemmungen des Rheins und seiner Nebenflüsse Ende November und Dezember 1882 (Düsseldorf, 1883); New York Times, 30 November 1882. 29. Washington Post, 21 March 1936. 30. New York Times, 20 March 1936. The article continues: “Among the sights 260 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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“Poor Dumb Brutes” or “Friends in Need”? which drew exclamations of pity from all was that of three forlorn black bears, which could not be moved from the Kingston Zoo. These animals, all large, had climbed from their pit as the waters rose to the roof of one of the animal houses. . . . Animals saved included sixty horses belonging to the 109th Field Artillery of the National Guard. With them were a couple of deer, a buffalo and two monkeys from the zoo.” 31. Joe Wojtas, “State’s Two Aquariums Restock One on the Bayou,” New York Times, 9 April 2006. 32. Gilbert F. White, Human Adjustment to Floods: A Geographical Approach to the Flood Problem in the United States, Research Paper 29, Department of Geography, University of Chicago (Chicago, 1945), 104–5, 109–10. 33. See American Red Cross, Evansville Chapter, Archives Commission, comp., History of the Flood, Evansville Area, January, February 1937 (Evansville, Ind., 1977). 34. Ibid., 30. 35. C. V. Youngquits and W. B. Langbein, Flood of August 1935 in the Muskingum River Basin, Ohio, U.S. Geological Survey, Water Supply Paper 869 (Washington, D.C., 1941). See also U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Milwaukee, Wisc., “Agricultural Flood Damage Appraisal for Labor Day Flood of 1941 in Northwestern Wisconsin,” April 1942, Folder “2–1403 Labor Day Flood of 1941 in Northwestern Wisconsin,” B19, Subject File of the Coordination of Flood Control Program, 1937–1942 (SFCFCP), RG 16, Records of the Department of Agriculture, Office of Plant and Operations, NA; and L. A. Reuss, Agricultural Economist, Division of Land Economics, North Central Region, to H. H. Wooten, Head, Flood Control Section, “Effects on Crops and Land from Recent Floods in Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri,” 19 June 1943, Folder “2-140 Emergency Flood Studies General,” B18, ibid. See also the undated report “Flood Damages—Yadkin River, Flood of August 13–15, 1940,” Folder “2-1401 Southeastern Flood of August 1940,” B18, ibid. 36. White, Human Adjustment to Floods, 54. See also Gilbert F. White, “The Limit of Economic Justification for Flood Protection,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 12 (1936): 133–48, esp. 137. 37. White, Human Adjustment to Floods, 78. In a report on flood-damage statistics, the German Imperial Statistical Office described animals in a typical way as “lebendes Inventar” (living stock). See “Gutachten betreffend Herstellung einer für Versicherungszwecke brauchbaren Statistik über Unwetter- und Ueberschwemmungsschäden,” att ached to Direktor, Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, to Staatssekretär des Innern, 28 June 1899, R3101/17116, Bundesarchiv Berlin. 38. Audubon, “A Flood of the Mississippi.” 39. Quoted from a letter to the Workingman’s Advocate, 21 March 1832. For a typical example of the plethora of untrustworthy and sensationalist stories about animals during a disaster, see Dan Kurzman’s account of the San Francisco earth261 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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u we lübk en quake and fi re in 1906, Disaster: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 (New York, 2001), 41: “one of the whinnying horses, while pulling a dray, had stepped into the fissure running down the middle of the street just as the chasm closed. The trapped animal, however, was later freed when a pick was used to break the ground around its feet. Other horses were not as fortunate. One two-horse team, crushed by a falling wall, sat up dog-fashion unable to move. A policeman took out his pistol and put them out of their misery.” 40. Pete Daniel, Deep’n as It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood (Fayetteville, Ark., 1996), 180–81. 41. Washington Post, 26 March 1882. 42. According to Allen, “The Great Flood of 1993,” large numbers of quail, skunks, raccoons, and possums could be seen on levees along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in 1993. See also Stickel, “Observations on the Effect of Flood on Animals,” 505. The Indianapolis Sunday Star, 7 February 1937, displays a picture of a bridge near West Point, Ky., during the 1937 flood of the Ohio River. The caption reads: “Marooned persons, automobiles and animals on a bridge . . . twenty miles south of Louisville, the only point free of water for miles around.” 43. The placement of catt le on levees was not undisputed, though, since it could jeopardize the safety of the protective structure (see Sadie James and Isabel Nelson, “Area Report of Concordia Parish Headquarters, Vidalia, Louisiana,” 15 March 1937, Folder “DR 735.11 Louisiana,” B 1267, DR 735, RG 200, NA). 44. Vicksburg Evening Post, 12 May 1927, quoted here from Daniel, Deep’n as It Come, 85. When Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf coast almost eighty years later, special teams were set up to search for and rescue animals in New Orleans; but many residents refused to give their pets away or to leave without them. On these events, see John Leland, “Dogs Are People, Too,” New York Times, 11 September 2005. See also “Friends in Need: Thousands of Beloved Pets Survived, but Will Their Owners Find Them?” People, 19 September 2005; and “An Outpouring for Other Victims, the Four-Legged Kind,” New York Times, 14 November 2005. In Oakland, after the 1991 fi restorm that killed 25 people and left more than 6,000 homeless, the survivors’ efforts to restore pets to their predisaster status was almost obsessive, as Susanna M. Hoff man has pointed out: “Pictures of found animals were displayed at the survivor-aid station. A telephone pet ‘hotline’ was activated. Foster homes were provided while owners were located and adoptions set up for the unclaimed. One of the fi nal editions of the Phoenix Journal announced that all retrieved but ownerless ‘fi re’ pets had been taken into good homes” (“The Monster and the Mother,” 116, 124). 45. Daniel, Deep’n as It Come, 86f. 46. Allen, “The Great Flood of 1993.” 47. New York Times, 22 March 1882. 48. James and Nelson, “Area Report of Concordia Parish Headquarters, Vidalia, Louisiana.” 262 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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“Poor Dumb Brutes” or “Friends in Need”? 49. American Red Cross, The Ohio-Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1937, 89. See also “Narrative Report for Daviess County Relief Operations, 1937 flood,” Folder “DR 735.11 Kentucky Counties, Carroll—Fleming,” B 1264, DR 735, RG 200, NA. 50. Washington Post, 26 March 1882. 51. Odman to Heilman, 5 March 1937, Folder “DR 735.11 Kentucky Counties, Hickman and Hopkins,” B 1264, DR 735, RG 200, NA. 52. About two-thirds of Daviess County, Ky., was covered by water from four to eight feet deep. There was no loss of human life but a substantial loss of livestock (see “Narrative Report for Daviess County Relief Operations, 1937 Flood,” Folder “DR 735.11 Kentucky Counties, Carroll—Fleming,” B 1264, DR 735, RG 200, NA). 53. U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Agricultural Flood Damage Appraisal for Labor Day Flood of 1941 in Northwestern Wisconsin,” April 1942, Folder “2-1403 Labor Day Flood of 1941 in Northwestern Wisconsin,” B19, SFCFCP, RG 16, NA. 54. Washington Post, 26 March 1882. 55. Quoted after Thomas Fauntleroy, “‘Lord, Plant My Feet on Higher Ground’: The Mississippi at Its Worst,” Memphis Independent, 4 June 1927. 56. Daniel, Deep’n as It Come, 87. 57. American Red Cross, History of the Flood, Evansville Area, 30. 58. New York Times, 22 March 1882. 59. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Ohio Floods: Can Such Calamities Be Prevented?” Outlook, 5 April 1913, 765–66. 60. John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York, 1997), 331. The county was Washington County, Miss. Altogether, the 1927 Mississippi flood drowned more than 1 million chicken; 9,000 work animals; 26,000 head of catt le; and 127,000 hogs (see Daniel, Deep’n as It Come, 87). 61. American Red Cross, The Ohio-Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1937: Report of Relief Operations of the American Red Cross (Washington, D.C., 1938), 21–22. More than 12,000 houses, barns, and similar structures were destroyed; another 60,000 were damaged. About 100,000 families reported the loss of household goods. The overall monetary damage infl icted by the flood amounted to $300 million. 62. “Report of Bullitt County February to June 4th, 1937,” Folder “DR 735.11 Kentucky Counties, Anderson—Butler,” B 1264, DR 735, RG 200, NA. For an example of a flood hitt ing an economically depressed region in Germany, see “Der Notschrei aus dem Spreewald,” Vorwärts, 24 March 1927. 63. See undated USDA report “Flood Damages—Yadkin River, Flood of August 13–15, 1940.” 64. William H. Allen, “The Great Flood of 1993,” Bioscience 43 (1993): 732–38, esp. 734.

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Counting Sheep in the English Lake District Rare Breeds, Local Knowledge, and Environmental History

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h a r r i et r it vo

In 2001, British television viewers were horrified to witness an apparent military assault on the nation’s ovine population. Civilian resources had proved inadequate to contain an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, and so the army was called in to expedite the destruction and disposal of sick animals as well as those considered at risk, which included apparently healthy herds and flocks living within a mile or so of any actual infection.1 Th is dramatic episode had serious political and economic implications. The British livestock industry was just beginning to recover from the protracted crisis caused by BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease), a crisis that had been significantly intensified by government mismanagement. Foot-and-mouth disease did not pose a serious threat to human health, and so the drastic eradication policy was based on economic rather than medical concerns; the farmers who lost their livestock nevertheless had many companions in suffering.2 Although outbreaks were scattered over much of the United Kingdom, they were concentrated in a few regions. Of the total cases, 45 percent occurred in Cumbria, which occupies the northwesternmost corner of England; more than 1 million sheep were slaughtered in that county alone, along with more than 250,000 other animals (catt le, pigs, goats, and deer).3 The videos that showed soldiers in batt le fatigues beside flaming pyres of carcasses also featured some of Britain’s most celebrated country landscapes. Columns of black smoke are inconsistent with conventional notions of 264

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rural beauty, and so this kind of free publicity had a predictably dampening effect on Lake District tourism. Perhaps more important, quarantine regulations imposed to prevent the spread of foot-and-mouth disease via shoes and clothing meant that walkers were largely confi ned to paved public roads, and prohibited from tramping across fields and fells. Although advertisements announced that the Lake District was open, this claim turned out to refer primarily to teashops and pubs. Even the gardens and parks of many large country houses were off-limits; for the duration of the emergency, admission fees bought access only to the façades and the furniture. If potential tourists could express their unhappiness with this state of affairs by staying away, local residents had to endure the combined calamities on the spot, sometimes even confi ned to their farms along with their doomed animals. A study conducted by the Institute for Health Research at nearby Lancaster University concluded that many livestock owners suffered emotional traumas that significantly transcended their material losses.4 Dramatic though they were, however, most of the effects of the foot-andmouth crisis also proved temporary. The outbreak seemed under control by the autumn of 2001, and by the next tourist season both sheep and walkers had returned to the Cumbrian fells. As had been the case with the earlier BSE crisis, public hysteria and public memory gradually receded, along with

Nero, a champion Herdwick ram, with his owner, 1870. (From Frank W. Garnett, Westmorland Agriculture 1800–1900 [Kendal, 1912], facing 152)

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the frequency of alarming newspaper headlines and television reports. But at least one consequence of the draconian (if belated) response to the outbreak threatened to be permanent. Although most livestock animals in the United Kingdom, as elsewhere, belong to a few favored modern breeds, the island also hosts a selection of minority breeds, living reminders of the rich British traditions of animal husbandry and agricultural improvement. According to the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, the organization that catalogues and monitors such breeds, those most at risk of disappearing—for example, Irish moiled catt le or Cleveland bay horses—may number only a few hundred individuals. They are likely to be concentrated in a few geographical areas, or even on a few farms, which means that either a fast-moving epizootic or a vigorous prophylactic cull could decimate a breed, or wipe it out completely.5 One of the strategies for ensuring the continuation of breeds designated as endangered, therefore, is to establish herds or flocks at widely separated locations. The dominant sheep breed in the Lake District never appeared on the Watchlist of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, since neither at the beginning of the foot-and-mouth outbreak nor, as it turned out, at the end did its numbers approach the 3,000-individual maximum for the least-threatened category. But the 100,000-strong Herdwick flock was nevertheless at similar risk from the policy of quarantine and culling since the animals were concentrated in a relatively small region (approximately 30 miles square) where foot-andmouth disease was especially prevalent, and where, in consequence, military maneuvers were particularly intense. The beleaguered Herdwicks therefore featured prominently in the press coverage of the foot-and-mouth outbreak; they were even singled out for special concern in a report that focused on the southwest of England, hundreds of miles distant.6 To some extent, this simply reflected the enormous magnitude of the cull. But quantification, whether in terms of animal corpses or fi nancial costs, could not adequately express either the extent or the nature of the feared loss. The Herdwicks were valued for a set of intrinsic qualities that distinguished (or seemed to distinguish) them from other breeds. It was widely predicted that their disappearance would irremediably disrupt the Cumbrian landscape and economy, producing a gap that no other sheep could ever fi ll. Modern Herdwick aficionados emphasize the hardiness of their favorite sheep in the face of harsh climatic conditions and their ability to sustain themselves by foraging on sparse upland vegetation. They praise the flavor of the Herdwicks’ meat, and they lament the coarseness of their wool (now 266

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Sketch-map of the Lake District. (From John Lubbock, The Scenery of England [London, 1902], 357)

mostly marketed for heritage carpets).7 In these characteristics, as well as in the breed standards specified by the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association, the animals do not seem to have altered much over the past several centuries.8 In 1805, for example, an agricultural survey of the north of England described the Herdwicks as “lively litt le animals, well adapted to seek their food amongst these rocky mountains”; in 1837, the veterinarian William Youatt declared that “the principal value of this breed is its hardiness.”9 One mid-nineteenth-century agricultural pundit characterized them as “small, well made, active, and polled [that is, hornless—current breed standards require that rams be horned], the faces and legs being more or less mott led with 267

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black [color is a particularly volatile characteristic—current breed standards identify such mott ling as an ‘objection’].”10 Despite this long history of separate recognition, however, in their appearance, their virtues, and their habits, Herdwicks so strongly resemble the sheep breeds that emerged or were developed in other, topographically similar regions of Britain that they are often treated as varieties of a single type. For example, when the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries compiled a catalogue of British livestock breeds in 1927, it included the Herdwick (along with the Scotch Blackface, the Lonk, the Derbyshire Gritstone, the Rough Fell, the Swaledale, the Limestone and Penistone, the Cheviot, the Welsh Mountain, the Radnor, the Exmoor Horn, and the Dartmoor—most of which bear the names of their rugged homelands) under the rubric “mountain sheep . . . distinguished by their hardiness and ability to thrive on poor food distributed over very large areas, their activity, small size, and extremely high quality of mutton.”11 It is possible to understand the impulse to distinguish the Herdwick on the basis of not much difference as an expression of more general tendencies in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century livestock breeding. Th is was the period in which modern breeds of catt le, pigs, and sheep—that is, breeds based on descent rather than on function or geography—were established, and then improved (or reified) through the institutions of societies, shows, and books of pedigrees.12 The Herdwicks basked in most of these forms of attention. Many of the early descriptions of the breed allude to a shadowy attempt (its time, place, or agents never specified) to corner the reproductive market, following the pattern established by Robert Bakewell and the Dishley Society with regard to New Leicester sheep (the major livestock marketing success story of the late eighteenth century). Youatt, for example, described a nameless association, “one of the regulations of which was, that they never should sell a ram, and not more than five ewe-lambs in one season.” He was relieved to report that unspecified means had been found “to elude this illiberal and shameful monopoly.”13 Much better documented were the prizes for Herdwicks offered at local shows, beginning with that of the Penrith Agricultural Society in 1833; the fi rst national prizes were offered at the 1855 meeting of the Royal Agricultural Society, which was held in nearby Carlisle. Although no Herdwick flock book was compiled until well into the twentieth century, the West Cumberland Fell Dales Sheep Association was founded in 1844 in order to improve and publicize the breed, which it accomplished mainly by holding annual shows. By 1910, the association offered prizes for Herdwicks in twenty-one separate classes.14 The strong sense of breed produced by all these ef268

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forts (branding, in modern terms) increased the visibility and prestige of the Herdwick designation, and therefore the cash value of the individual animals within it. The farmers and fanciers who deployed such means to enhance breed recognition and prestige normally did not present their agenda in these crudely mercantile or quantitative terms. Instead, they characterized themselves as protectors of the breed or advocates of its interests. They frequently claimed that they were working to defend their chosen breed’s purity, which implied the existence of deep historical roots and long reproductive isolation (claims and implication that were at odds with the demonstrably recent consolidation of most breeds). For example, an article in the preeminent Victorian agricultural journal asserted that the Herdwicks possessed “more of the characters of an original race than any other in the county” and that they showed “no marks of kindred with any other race.”15 Th is assertion was butt ressed by the breed’s strong association with the hills of Cumberland and Westmorland; but it was simultaneously undermined by numerous Herdwick origin stories that agreed on nothing but the fact that the sheep had arrived in Cumbria by ship. According to Youatt, they were descended from a group of Scotch sheep traveling aboard a ship that was stranded on the Cumberland coast early in the eighteenth century. In this version, the ship’s captain sold the sheep to local farmers, who set them free to roam the hills.16 Alternative accounts were less matter-of-fact and still less verifiable, deriving the breed from the wreck of the Spanish Armada or of some more ancient and nebulous Scandinavian voyagers.17 Modern historians of livestock tend to discount all these romantic stories, instead stressing the telltale physical similarities that link Herdwicks to the other hardy mountain sheep of Wales and the west of England.18 Nevertheless, the claims of exotic origin resurfaced in press accounts of footand-mouth disease, along with (somewhat inconsistent) assertions that the breed was native to the Lake District. Thus one credulous journalist confidently credited the Vikings with their introduction, while also citing a local farmer as authority for their indigenous status.19 Strictly speaking, there are no indigenous British sheep since domesticated European sheep all descend from the mouflon of the eastern Mediterranean. A few barely surviving British breeds, such as the Soay and the Shetland, resemble the animals that were originally introduced to Britain between two thousand and four thousand years ago, but the Herdwick is not among them.20 Their indigenousness nevertheless remains a highly valued att ribute of the Herdwicks, albeit a somewhat elusive and unstable one. And 269

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if the breed could not claim a truly chthonic relationship to the Cumbrian hills, it did have several powerful connections to the landscape it inhabited. Not only were Herdwicks strikingly well adapted, through a combination of natural and artificial selection, to the rigorous living conditions on the northern fells, but they were widely believed to possess unique local knowledge. As one agricultural encyclopedia put it: “when wandering uncontrolled over the mountains, they display remarkable instinctive sagacity. . . . [N]o sheep could . . . be better fitted for the locality.”21 Traditional descriptions of Herdwicks often emphasized the special affi nity of each flock for its particular territory, asserting that information about its nooks and crannies—where best to feed and shelter, where the footing was dangerous—was passed down through the ovine generations, without human assistance or interference. In this case, familiarity appeared to breed attachment rather than contempt. The fondness of Herdwick sheep for their native “heaf ” (a northern dialect term for their accustomed pastures) was so widely recognized that special legal clauses taking account of their tendency to return to what they considered their home were often inserted into contracts for their purchase or lett ing; when a tenant took over a new farm, the resident flock often constituted part of the bargain.22 Thus, when the entire breed was threatened by foot-and-mouth disease, a cultural as well as a genetic heritage seemed on the verge of disappearing. An article in the Independent, which characterized the sheep themselves as one of the most “innate” att ractions of the Lake District, explained that the “‘heft ing’ instincts” that were “passed from ewe to lamb” allowed the sheep to roam up to forty miles without gett ing lost—as it happened, this was the same tendency that put them into contact with the largest possible number of potential carriers of infection.23 The reporter went on to speculate that the sheep were not the only feature of the Lake District scene that might disappear. He further feared that the whole ecology of the region might be changed “beyond recognition.”24 Although this concern sounds exaggerated, it was well founded (or would be well founded if the Herdwicks turned out to be truly irreplaceable—that is, if no introduced sheep breed could adapt with equal effectiveness to this challenging sett ing). Ever since the Lake District emerged as an iconic English sett ing in the late eighteenth century, it has been prized as a profoundly natural landscape—if not unpeopled, then essentially unaltered by human activity. The att ractiveness and durability of this characterization has proved impressively invulnerable to modification by counterevidence, no matter how 270

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robust. The poet William Wordsworth, who wrote a Guide to the Lakes for visitors (fi rst published in 1810 and frequently reissued), surveyed the human impact on the Lake District beginning with the ancient Britons. But at the same time that he described repeated anthropogenic alterations of the landscape, he implicitly erased them. Especially as his gaze descended the social ladder, he conflated human and natural processes, so that the cottages of the humbler inhabitants reminded him “of a production of nature, and may . . . rather be said to have grown than to have been erected; . . . so litt le is there in them of formality, such is their wildness and beauty.”25 Following the path blazed by Wordsworth, the famous opium eater Thomas De Quincey called the Lake District “one paradise of virgin beauty.”26 In the course of the nineteenth century, human impact on the Lake District became increasingly obvious, largely as a result of the synergistic impact of tourism and railway construction. None of this diminished the appeal of Wordsworth’s perspective to subsequent admirers of what they perceived as the unspoiled landscape. On the contrary, the allegedly virgin or natural condition of the Lake District seemed to become more appealing as the evidence supporting that view of it diminished. Th is is not to say that such evidence had ever been very strong; modern transportation technology was far from uniquely transformative. The region had been shaped for over five millennia by human farmers, miners, and pastoralists.27 But the distinctive bare, stark upland scenery that was the focus of the most intense admiration was only indirectly a human creation. Norse invaders sett led in Cumbria during the tenth century, clearing woods to make farmsteads, and sett ing their catt le and sheep loose to roam the hills. Over time, the more efficient and less choosy sheep became the dominant ungulate presence, steadily nibbling away at struggling tree saplings and so preventing reforestation.28 Whether they were the storied ancestral Herdwicks or whether the Herdwicks subsequently replaced them, these Viking chattels and their successors were indeed responsible for producing and maintaining the ecology that continues to characterize the higher altitudes of the Lake District, as well as its distinctive appearance. The floral and faunal assemblages that coexisted with them on the denuded fells were very different from those that had flourished in the preexisting forests.29 With regard to mammals at the end of the nineteenth century, this fauna included foxes, badgers, otters, pine martens, stoats, weasels, several species of deer, and a varied mix of rodents, insectivores, and bats. Because of the region’s remoteness from centers of human population and its unsuitability for intensive development, remnant populations of some species lingered there 271

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after they had become extinct in most other parts of Britain. Isolation was no guarantee of survival, however, especially since local human residents, though not numerous, were themselves enthusiastic predators. Cumbrian wolves, bears, wild boars, and beavers had long since disappeared, along with their lowland conspecifics; and in 1892, the naturalist H. A. Macpherson lamented that even the memory of the wildcat (which resembles a particularly formidable tabby) “no longer survives among the venerable dalesmen whose grandfathers were the chief instruments of its extinction.”30 He further noted that badgers, which had been plentiful through most of the eighteenth century, had vanished by 1875; that the numbers of pine martens “have of late years greatly decreased”; that “within the last thirty years the Polecat has become very scarce in Lakeland”; and that otters were threatened “by those who surreptitiously trap these fi ne animals.”31 Although Macpherson offered a single explanation (that is, human hunting) for all these declines, a century later the opposed pressures of environmental change and habitat preservation had produced a range of results. Badger populations had rebounded, while the otter and the pine marten tottered on the verge of local extinction (both subsequently saved by recolonization from outside), and the polecat had toppled over.32 Nor were people, whether in the guise of Homo venaticus or of Homo economicus, the only source of challenge to Cumbrian wildlife. Macpherson’s catalogue included only one kind of squirrel, the indigenous red Sciurus vulgaris, but a 1970 survey noted of Sciurus carolinensis, the invading gray squirrel of North America: “Stragglers reported since World War II. Profoundly hoped not yet breeding.” These hopes were doomed to disappointment, since gray squirrels have established themselves in several parts of the Lake District, and seem likely to outcompete the red squirrels there, as they have done elsewhere in Britain, despite the vigorous legal protection given the native squirrel.33 The red squirrel in its doomed struggle to resist the transatlantic onslaught has sometimes served as a national symbol of embatt led purity and isolation. For example, when the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded £626,000 to protect what supporters affectionately termed “the real Squirrel Nutkin,” the grant drew praise from politicians representing the entire political spectrum—not just the mainstream parliamentary parties, but also the (self-described) “patriotic nationalist” British National Party.34 Th is generalized iconic status has not translated to the Lake District, however, even though the area remains one of its few remaining refuges, and even though the red squirrel’s prominent place in British affections owes much to the work of Beatrix Potter, herself a celebrated Lake District resident. Like the other wild animals that 272

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inhabit the hills and valleys of the Lake District, it is not specifically Cumbrian, but rather part of a fauna that was once widely distributed in Britain and, indeed, throughout northern Europe (the reason that dwindling otter and pine marten populations could be successfully reinforced by imported animals). The most distinctive feature of Lake District natural history is the alpine floral assemblage of the high fells, the residuum of the vegetation that colonized the entire area after the retreat of the last Pleistocene glaciation; it is unique in England, although similar to that of the high altitudes of Scotland and Wales (as well as to that of tundra areas much farther north).35 Large ubiquitous animals tend to have more charisma than small and relatively inaccessible plants, however att ractive and indigenous. And so, for that reason alone, it is not surprising that the Herdwicks have emerged as popular symbols of the Lake District, rather than the alpine flowers, despite their recent accession to indigenous status and their incontestable status as domesticates. For those who, like Thomas De Quincey, romantically view the Lake District as a preserve of unspoiled nature, these characteristics may emphasize the unsuitability of the Herdwicks for their representative role. For those with a more historically nuanced understanding of the Cumbrian landscape, the recent advent of the Herdwicks and their liminal lifestyle may actually enhance their iconic qualifications. Whether technically indigenous or not, the Herdwicks have strong physical and economic ties to their place; they live there and (almost) nowhere else; they have helped to produce its modern shape. Further, like the landscape itself, they seem wilder than they are; that is, they appear to be independent and free-ranging, but their lives (and, indeed, their very existence) are ultimately determined by human economic exigencies. Their liberty is intermittently interrupted so that their owners can help, cull, or otherwise manage them. They are both accessible (that is, there are a lot of them and they are everywhere, not only in the fields, but grazing and napping beside the roads and even on top of them) and also inaccessible (that is, they are skitt ish, and tend to retreat when approached). One other domesticated animal—the border collie—shares many of the characteristics that make the Herdwicks iconic. They roam equally widely over the hills, and often, in a sense, more wildly. Unconstrained sheep behave very similarly to constrained sheep, confi ning most of their attention to whatever they are trying to eat, while unconstrained off-duty collies may undergo what looks like a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation, and persecute members of other flocks when they are not responsible for herding and protecting their own. Paradoxically, however, this apparently uncharacteristic 273

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behavior underlines the extent to which the dogs belong within the human orbit. Sheep worrying is an extreme and (from the human perspective) unfortunate expression of the same intelligence and aggression that make collies such effective shepherds. If not fi rmly controlled by their masters, they would play a very different role in the web of Cumbrian life (or perhaps no role at all, since dogs caught in the act of harassing sheep are apt to be shot). The foot-and-mouth epizootic of 2001 (or the official response to the outbreak and the subsequent journalistic accounts) cast a lurid and fl ickering light on the relationship of Herdwick sheep to their natal hills—a relationship that, if not primordial, has deep historical roots and powerful cultural resonance. The episode is of obvious interest to historians of agriculture and of public health, whether of humans or of other species. It is also of interest to environmental historians. In part, this is because any story that unfolds in a rural landscape, especially one that has experienced or is vulnerable to significant change, engages concerns at the core of environmental history. But it is not only the transformation of the Lake District landscape—either temporarily, by its conversion into a site of guerrilla warfare, or, potentially, permanently, by the removal or replacement of a large component of its mammalian population—that constitutes the importance of the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic of 2001, along with its antecedents and contexts, for environmental historians. Every component of this story engages the ambiguous boundary (or nonboundary) between the wild and the domesticated, the natural and the human: not only the reengineered landscape and the untrammeled sheep, but the responses of breeders, farmers, government officials, journalists, and members of the public, both over time and to the immediate crisis. As one thoughtful commentator put it at the time, “foot-and-mouth has shown . . . that sheep . . . provide a vital connection linking people, animals, the land and capital.”36 Environmental history is a relatively new field, as historical subdisciplines go, and in North America it is rooted in the history of the frontier and of European encounters with what has conventionally, although far from unproblematically, been perceived as wilderness.37 As a result, many researchers have tended to emphasize relatively (or at least apparently) static features of the landscape of western North America, such as mountains, rivers, and forests. If animals have figured in such accounts, it has most often been as the targets or rivals of hunters, or, in a more literary register, as the symbolic representatives of nature (a term fraught with even more problems than is wilderness—Raymond Williams famously called nature “perhaps the most complex word in the language”).38 In Europe, environmental history is even 2 74

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newer (that is to say, the label is even newer), but its roots are more complex and at least as deep. They encompass not only the study of places perceived as wild, whether on the imperial frontiers or on the undeveloped peripheries of Europe, but also the study of the long-tamed and deeply familiar countryside. Increasingly, however, even American environmental historians have turned their attention to the landscapes of domestication that replaced many former frontiers. Inevitably, animals have played a more prominent role in the complementary histories of environments transformed by European agricultural practices, from the subsistence farms of eastern New England to the ranches of central Mexico.39 If the agricultural landscape, especially the newly agricultural landscape, can now be understood as a kind of border territory, a contact zone where the natural and the artificial or technological intermingle, domesticated animals have long occupied a similarly liminal position. Their simple presence inevitably brings their absent wild relatives to mind. One reason that few ordinary people kept pets for modern reasons—that is, to provide pleasure rather than labor—until late in the eighteenth century was that even the smallest and least ferocious dog or cat seemed to represent the intrusion of wild and threatening nature into the family circle; as technology made nature seem less terrifying, so animals could become explicit friends rather than ostensible servants.40 Charles Darwin played on the analogy between domesticated animals and wild animals at the beginning of On the Origin of Species when he used artificial selection, the technique by means of which breeders tried to determine the characteristics of pedigreed livestock and pets, to introduce the much more radical and profound notion of natural selection, the process by means of which species evolve in nature.41 The analogy has been continually strengthened by the practices of both scientific taxonomists primarily concerned with wild animals and breeders (and others) primarily concerned with domesticated animals. Thus domesticates are routinely assigned to a different species than that occupied by their wild progenitors, even if, as is the case with the dog, those relatives still exist and interbreed freely given the opportunity.42 Conversely, the Rare Breeds Survival Trust has borrowed the categories developed for vanishing wild species, even though much less is at stake in terms of biodiversity and ecology if a single strain of catt le or sheep disappears. Perhaps as a tacit acknowledgment of this difference of degree, the RBST has added “traditional,” its least threatened category, to “critical,” “endangered,” “vulnerable,” and “at risk.”43 The understandings produced by these layered connections are often submerged, but at the time of the foot-and-mouth outbreak, they surfaced 275

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dramatically. Or, to put it another way, figurative relationships suddenly seemed very concrete. The armed assault on the Herdwick sheep represented an attack on both the domesticated countryside and the unspoiled natural landscape. It connected the suffering of individual animals with the suffering of their human proprietors and with the less acute deprivation of the larger public for whom the Cumbrian hill country was both a popular recreational destination and a sacred national space. The Herdwicks were demonstrably neither native nor wild, both qualities that figured prominently in the Lake District mythos. Nevertheless, they still seemed, as they had two centuries earlier, “peculiar to that high, exposed, rocky, mountainous district.”44 And despite their murky origins and their intermediate position between human husbandry and the harsh life of the fells—or perhaps because of them—this hardy and home-loving breed of sheep had become the vehicle through which deep understandings of their environment were routinely expressed.

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Notes 1. An elaborate verbal and visual record of the outbreak is available on the BBC Web site, htt p://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2001/foot_and_mouth/ default.stm. 2. Foot-and-mouth is a highly contagious viral disease of livestock, but it generally causes significant mortality only among the youngest animals. Humans can be infected, but such infections are extremely rare. The disease is endemic in parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. It poses a double economic threat to herds and flocks in Europe and North America. While animals are sick and recovering, they cannot do their jobs (especially putt ing on weight), and so valuable time is lost. But more damaging is the quarantine imposed because of the importation barriers created by nations free from foot-and-mouth disease to exclude animals and animal products from nations where foot-and-mouth disease is endemic. In order to avoid or minimize such ostracism, authorities subject any farm that is the site of an outbreak, as well as much surrounding territory, to a stringent isolation regime. A vaccine exists, but it cannot be used in nations free of foot-and-mouth disease because the antibodies it produces are indistinguishable from those produced by an actual outbreak (World Organization for Animal Health Web site, www.oie .int/eng/maladies/fiches/A_A010.HTM). 3. Ian Convery et al., “Death in the Wrong Place?: Emotional Geographies of the UK 2001 Foot-and-Mouth Disease Epidemic,” Journal of Rural Studies 21 (2005): 103–4. 4. Ibid., 107. See also Sarah Franklin, “Sheepwatching,” Anthropology Today 17 (2001): 3–9. 5. Richard Lutwyche et al., “Special: Foot-and-mouth and Rare Breeds,” Ark 29 276 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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Counting Sheep in the English Lake District (Autumn 2001): 97–107; Rare Breeds Survival Trust Web site, www.rbst.org .uk/watch-list/main.php. 6. Peter Gripaios et al., “The Economic Impact of Foot-and-Mouth Disease,” June 2001, South West Economy Centre, University of Plymouth; Lawrence Alderson, “Foot-and-Mouth Disease in the United Kingdom 2001: Its Cause, Course, Control and Consequences,” paper presented at RBI/EAAP/FAO meeting, Budapest 23 August 2001, www.warmwell.com/aldersonsept3.html. 7. The National Trust, which owns a great deal of hill property in the Lake District and therefore also a great many Herdwicks, offers all-Herdwick heritage meat hampers for £75 and £90 (National Trust Web site, www.nationaltrust.org. uk/main). 8. Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association Web site, www.herdwick-sheep.com/ herdwick_standards/index.htm. 9. John Bailey and George Culley, General View of the Agriculture of Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmorland (1805; Newcastle, 1972), 246; William Youatt , Sheep: Their Breeds, Management, and Diseases (London, 1837), 279. 10. W. C. L. Martin, “The Sheep,” in The Farmer’s Library. Animal Economy, 2 vols. (London, 1848–49), 2:109. 11. Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, British Breeds of Livestock (London, 1927), 93. 12. For extended discussion of these developments, see Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 45–141; Harriet Ritvo, “Possessing Mother Nature: Genetic Capital in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves, 413–26 (London, 1995); and Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 104–20. 13. Youatt , Sheep, 279. 14. Frank Wilson, Westmorland Agriculture 1800–1900 (Kendal, 1912), 161–63. 15. William Dickinson, “On the Farming of Cumberland,” Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England 13 (1852): 207–300, esp. 264. 16. Youatt , Sheep, 278. 17. Wilson, Westmorland Agriculture, 151. 18. Stephen J. G. Hall and Juliet Clutton-Brock, Two Hundred Years of British Farm Livestock (London, 1989), 116; Robert Trow-Smith, A History of British Livestock Husbandry 1700–1900 (London, 1959), 134–35. 19. Express, 27 March 2001. 20. Juliet Clutton-Brock, A Natural History of Domesticated Animals (London, 1987), 53; Hall and Clutton-Brock, Two Hundred Years of British Farm Livestock, 99. 21. Martin, “The Sheep,” 109. 22. Wilson, Westmorland Agriculture, 159; Bruce Thompson, The Lake District and the National Trust (Kendal, 1946), 177. 277 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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h a r r iet r it vo 23. Ian Herbert, “Foot-and-Mouth Crisis: Cumbria,” Independent, 27 March 2001. 24. Herbert, “Foot-and-Mouth Crisis.” 25. William Wordsworth, The Illustrated Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, ed. Peter Bicknell (New York, 1984), 105. 26. Thomas De Quincey, Literary Reminiscences from the Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater, vol. 3 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 23 vols. (Boston, 1851–60), 311. 27. For an overview of the development of the Cumbrian landscape, see W. H. Pearsall and Winifred Pennington, The Lake District: A Landscape History (London, 1973). 28. Clare Fell, Early Settlement in the Lake Counties (Clapham, Yorks, 1972), 84; Angus J. L. Winchester, The Harvest of the Hills: Rural Life in Northern England and the Scottish Borders, 1400–1700 (Edinburgh, 2000), 103–4. 29. I. G. Simmons, The Moorlands of England and Wales: An Environmental History 8000 bc–ad 2000 (Edinburgh, 2003), 24. 30. H. A. Macpherson, A Vertebrate Fauna of Lakeland, Including Cumberland and Westmorland with Lancashire North of the Sands (Edinburgh, 1892), 9. 31. Macpherson, Vertebrate Fauna, 44, 25, 27, 35. 32. P. Delap, “Mammals,” in Natural History of the Lake District, ed. G. A. K. Hervey and J. A. G. Barnes (London, 1970), 176–94; John Webster, “Mammals in Cumbria—A Centenary Review,” in Cumbrian Wildlife in the Twentieth Century, ed. David J. Clarke and Stephen M. Hewitt (1996), 77–88. 33. Macpherson, Vertebrate Fauna, 76; Delap, “Mammals,” 193; Webster, “Mammals,” 84. 34. Brian Dooks, “Lottery Cash Aids Efforts to Save the Red Squirrel,” Yorkshire Post, 11 April 2006; British National Party Web site, www.bnp.org.uk/index.php. 35. G. A. K. Hervey, “Flowering Plants, Ferns and Mosses,” in Natural History of the Lake District, ed. Hervey and Barnes, 37–45. 36. Franklin, “Sheepwatching,” 4. 37. For an influential explication of these problems, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Gett ing Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. Cronon, 69–90 (New York, 1995). 38. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York, 1985), 219. Karl Jacoby has examined confl icting understandings of the role of wild animals in nineteenth-century American frontiers in Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, 2001). 39. Among many sources, see Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1972; repr., New York, 2003); and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (1993; repr., Cambridge, 278 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

Counting Sheep in the English Lake District

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U.K., 2004); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983; repr., New York, 2003); Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (1994; repr., Cambridge, U.K., 1997), and Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York, 2004). 40. Harriet Ritvo, “The Emergence of Modern Petkeeping,” Anthrozoos (Winter 1987), reprinted in Animals and People Sharing the World, ed. Andrew Rowan (Hanover, N.H., 1988). 41. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859; repr., Cambridge, Mass., 1964), ed. Ernst Mayr, 7–43. 42. Clutton-Brock, A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals, 196–97. 43. Rare Breeds Survival Trust Web site, www.rbst.org.uk/index.php. 44. Bailey and Culley, General View, 245.

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CONTR IBUTORS

Mark V. Barrow Jr. is an Associate Professor in the History Department and an affi liated faculty member in the Science and Technology in Society Department at Virginia Tech. His research centers on the historical intersection of natural history, wildlife conservation, and American culture. His fi rst book, A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology after Audubon (1998), won the Forum for the History of Science in America Book Prize and the Choice Magazine Outstanding Book Award. His second book is entitled Nature’s Ghost: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology (2009).

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Dorothee Brantz is an Assistant Professor of Transatlantic Urban History and Director of the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the TU Berlin. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Free University Berlin; the German Historical Institute, Washington D.C.; and the University of Cologne. She has published on the history of slaughterhouses, human-animal relations in the city, and the role of nature in urban space. Peter Edwards is a Professor of Early Modern British Social History at the University of Roehampton, London. His primary research field deals with the role of horses in early modern Western society, especially in Britain, and he has published extensively on the subject. His most recent book is entitled Horse and Man in Early Modern England (2007). He also publishes on agriculture and rural society in early modern Britain and on the logistics of the British Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century. Kelly Enright holds a Ph.D. in American History from Rutgers University and a master’s in Museum Anthropology from Columbia University. She is the author of Rhinoceros (2008) and America’s Natural Places: Rocky Mountains and Great Plains (2010). Her dissertation examines American images of “jungle” and “rain forest.” Enright has consulted and researched for museums and nonprofits, including the Wildlife Conservation Society/Bronx Zoo, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. 281 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

contr ibutor s

Oliver Hochadel is a historian of science and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre d’Estudis d’Història de la Ciència (CEHIC) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona working on the history of human-origins research in the late twentieth century. He is the author of a monograph on electricity as a public science in the German enlightenment, Öffentliche Wissenschaft: Elektrizität in der deutschen Aufklärung (2003). He coedited, with Ursula Kocher, Lügen und Betrügen: Das Falsche in der Geschichte von der Antike bis zur Moderne (2000); and, with Peter Heering and David Rhees, Playing with Fire: A Cultural History of the Lightning Rod (2009). From 2001 to 2004, he was a member of a research group working on the history of the Schönbrunn Menagerie in Vienna. He also works as a freelance science journalist, serves as coeditor of the Austrian science magazine heureka!, and is cofounder of a postgraduate program in science communications in Vienna.

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Uwe Lübken is a Research Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and is currently fi nishing a book project on the history of flooding on the Ohio River. In 2002, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Cologne, where his dissertation, “Bedrohliche Nähe: Die USA und die nationalsozialistische Herausforderung in Lateinamerika,” was awarded the Erhardt Imelmann Prize; the revised dissertation was published in 2004. From 2004 to 2008, he worked as a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. He has taught American history at the University of Cologne, and postwar German and European history at the Cologne School of Journalism. Garry Marvin is Professor of Human-Animal Studies at Roehampton University, London. Human-animal relationships, particularly the performances of such relationships, are the focus of his research. He has previously published anthropological studies of bullfighting, cockfighting, zoos, foxhunting, and taxidermy. He is presently working on a monograph on the cultural histories of wolves. Clay McShane is a Professor of History at Northeastern University in Boston. As a historian of urban infrastructures and technology, he has published Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (1994) and The Automobile: A Chronology of Its Antecedents, Development, and Impact (1997). With Joel Tarr, he coauthored The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the 19th Century (2007). Amy Nelson is an Associate Professor of History at Virginia Tech. A specialist in Russian-Soviet culture, she is writing a collective biography of the Soviet space dogs and editing a volume on animals in Russian history and culture. Her 282 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

contr ibutor s

book Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia (2004) received the Heldt Prize from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies. Nelson’s recent publications include “A Hearth for a Dog: The Paradoxes of Soviet Pet Keeping,” in Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia, ed. Lewis Siegelbaum (2006), and “Der abwesende Freund: Laikas kulturelles Nachleben,” in Ich, das Tier: Tiere als Persönlichkeiten in Kunst, Wissenschaft und Geschichte, ed. Heike Fuhlbrügge et al. (2008). A longtime advocate for stray and abandoned companion animals, she currently serves as a volunteer for the Friends of Animal Care and Control in Montgomery County, Virginia. Susan J. Pearson is an Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University. She has authored essays on the concept of cruelty, the history of baby contests, and the modern animal rights movement. Currently she is preparing a book on the linked histories of animal- and child-protection organizations in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States. She is also one of the founding editors of the “H-Animal” Listserv.

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Helena Pycior is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her articles have appeared in Isis, Journal of the History of Ideas, Social Studies of Science, Society & Animals, and Victorian Studies. She is the author of a history of early modern British algebra (1997) and coeditor of a collection of essays on spousal collaboration in science and mathematics (1996). Currently, she is writing a book on the history of presidential pets. Harriet Ritvo is the Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at the Massachusett s Institute of Technology and the President of the American Society for Environmental History. Her books include The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987); The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (1997); and The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (2009). Nigel Rothfels is the author of Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (2002), a history of the emergence of naturalistic displays in zoological gardens at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the editor of an interdisciplinary collection of essays in animal studies, Representing Animals (2002). He has been a recipient of postdoctoral research fellowships from Princeton University, the Australian National University, and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, and is currently researching ideas about elephants since the eighteenth century. He is the Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. 283 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

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Joel A. Tarr is the Richard Caligiuri University Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. His research centers on urban history and the study of the environment. He has published numerous books, including The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (1996) and Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region (2005). Together with Clay McShane, he authored The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the 19th Century (2007).

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Mary Weismantel is a Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University, where she has also served as the Director of Latin American Studies. She has done ethnographic research in the Andes since 1980. She has written about race and racism, gender, sex and sexuality, adoption and kinship, food and cooking, and is currently writing about pre-Columbian art. She is the author of two books, the award-winning Cholas and Pishtacos: Tales of Race and Sex in the Andes (2001), and Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes (1989; Spanish translation 1994). Her articles have been published in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Bulletin of Latin American Research, Identities, Modern Language Notes, and Food and Foodways, as well as in edited volumes.

284 Beastly Natures : Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, University of Virginia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443985. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-01-06 10:33:19.

INDEX

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Italicized page numbers refer to illustrations. abuse: catalogue of, 165; of humans, 158 Academy of Sciences, 93. See also Langer, Carl activists, 236; animal-rights, 30, 44, 49, 54; pro-wildlife, 73 Adam. See Bible Africa, 45, 51, 120; eastern, 81; southern, 41; sub-Saharan, 25 agency: of animals, 19, 27, 53, 116, 169–70, 205; historical understanding of, 4, 27; of humans, 2, 22; instinct and, 20; of nature, 27, 128 agriculture, 205; enclosure of, 166 Albania, 67–71 alligator, American, 127–52, 130; as att raction, 134; behavior of, 131; closed hunting season on, 140–42; as commodity, 136–40, 138, 142, 144; destruction of habitat of, 140, 142; domestication of, 128, 133, 134, 135; as endangered species, 140–41, 144, 145; farms, 134, 135, 139, 145; hunting of, 128, 132, 138, 140–41, 143–44, 145; as mascot, 135; as “nuisance,” 144; perceptions of, 129, 132; poaching of, 140, 142; as predator, 129–32; report of att ack by, 131; as symbol of Florida landscape, 132–35, 136, 142; trade in, 144; wrestling, 134 Alligator and Its Allies, The (Reese), 131 America. See United States, states and regions of American Alligator Council, 143, 144

American Red Cross, 251, 253, 255, 256; nurses of, 246 American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), 236–37 American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 229 American Zoo and Aquarium Association, 51 anatomists, 95, 99; human, 97 animals: ability to interact with culture, 111–12; for amusement, 111–12, 120; appearance of, 41; att itudes toward, 156, 158; behavioral standards for, 170; biography, 177; in cities, 251; cohabitation with, 156; companionship, 24, 275; constructions of, 62; cruelty to, 156, 158, 163, 237; dealers, 94; death of due to flooding, 256; decrepit, 168–69; domesticated, 155, 166, 167, 170, 247, 250; domestication of, 155, 258; dominion over, 171; encounter of, 65; energy, source of, 25; experimental, 205; exploitation of, 155; extermination of, 157, 158; feelings of, 156; in floods, 254–56; gestation of, 170; habitats of, 249; independence of, 170; individuality among, 115; instilling fear in, 162; intelligence of, 157; laboratory, 30; looking at, 116; marginalization of, 47; mechanistic view of, 229–31; mental states of, 52, 178, 180; and nature, 18, 25, 29, 49, 274, 275; philosophical att itudes toward, 156; political economy in studies of, 25–26, 28; pollution by, 228; as product, 29–30; representation of, 47, 285

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inde x animals (continued) 53–56, 62–63, 122, 205; resistance of, 170; as scientific specimens, 119; skin of, 24, 30; as targets, 274; treatment of, 62, 157, 165, 199, 206; on trial, 2, 170; urbanization of, 228; uses of, 65. See also agency; anthropomorphism —named: Black Diamond (elephant), 42-43; Chunee (elephant), 42-43; Felicette (cat), 206; Flush (cocker spaniel), 177; Ham (chimpanzee), 206; Jumbo (elephant), 43, 205; Krao (a “hairy girl”), 99; Madame Sophie (orangutan), 81, 84, 92, 100; Mafuka (chimpanzee), 85, 86, 94, 97; Miss Bessy (orangutan), 84, 94; M’pungu (gorilla), 85, 94; Old Put (rhinoceros), 115; Polaris (Eskimo dog), 177; Seabiscuit, 205. See also Fala; Laddie Boy; Laika; space dogs, Soviet “animals of the mind,” 30 animal welfare groups, 204, 209 antelopes, 81 anthropocentrism: challenges to the notion of, 169; elements of, 189; grounds for, 171; in portraits, 181; views of the Middle Ages, 155 anthropology, 19, 23, 25; in eighteenth century, 96; racist narrative of, 99 anthropomorphism, 111, 116, 122, 123, 180, 192; error of, 180, 188; reliance on, 196; resistance to, 112 anticarnivore alliance, 73–74 anticruelty: groups, 236; laws, 237. See also American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) apes, 82, 92; cadavers of, 82; “homesickness” of, 93; perception of, 82, 91; in space programs, 206; as zoo att raction, 90, 92 —anthropoid, 85–100; arrival of, 97; cadavers of, 95, 96; controversy of, 87; dissection of, 96; as epistemological object, 87, 95; mortality of, 93, 96; pub-

lic demand for, 96; sight of, 90. See also chimpanzees; gorillas; orangutans “ape theory,” 82. See also Darwinism Apopka, Lake, 128 aristocracy. See class issues Ashes and Snow (Web site), 38 ass, 158, 166 Association for the Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge, 88 Astley, John, 163 audience. See visitors Audubon, John J., 247–48, 249, 254 Audubon Aquarium of the Americas, 251 Audubon Society, 140, 143 badgers, 271–72 Baret, Michael, 158, 160 Barkers for Britain, 184, 185. See also Fala Barnum, P. T., 119–20 Barnum and Bailey Circus, 41 Bartram, William, 130–31 bats, 271 bears, 247, 272 “beast machine,” 157 beavers, 272 Begu, Ferdinand, 67–68 Berger, John, 46, 47, 55 Bericht für eine Akademie (Kafk a), 92 Berlin “Aquarium,” 85, 88, 97 bestiaries, 130 Bible, 120, 121, 156; scholars of, 109. See also unicorn “biocosmists,” 206 biodiversity, 73, 275; loss of, 250, 258 biography, 176, 179; canine, 177, 178–79, 180, 188, 199; dual, 180–81; of president and dog, 180. See also Suckley, Margaret birds: bower, 51; exotic, 81 Bischoff, Theodor Wilhelm Ludwig, 95 bits, 162, 164, 228, 233, 235. See also horses: cruelty to blinders, 228, 233 Blundeville, Thomas, 159, 160, 162, 163, 168

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inde x

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boa constrictors, 81 boars, wild, 272 Bölsche, Wilhelm, 89 bones, 24, 30 border collie, 273 Borneo, 84 breeders, 159, 162; of domesticated animals, 275; gentleman, 161 Brehm, Alfred, 88–89; Thierleben (Life of Animals), 88, 99 bridle, 163 Britain. See England Brühl, Carl Bernhard, 88, 90, 96 BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), 264, 265 buffalo, 140 Bundles for Britain, 184. See also Fala Busch, Wilhelm, 92 Butler, Judith, 21 cab drivers, 228 cadavers, animal, 99; anthropoid ape, 95; gorilla, 95; orangutan, 93, 94 Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, 55 Call It Sleep (Roth), 236 camels, 111 capitalism, 29; and animals, 47–49; role of horse in, 25 Carr, Archie, 142–43, 144 carriages. See vehicles, horse-drawn carts. See vehicles, horse-drawn cats, in space program, 206 catt le, 22, 26, 27, 28, 29, 254, 255–56, 264, 275; Irish moiled, 266 Cavendish, Margaret, 163, 169 Cavendish, William, 159, 160, 161, 164 chickens, 30, 256 children: alligator att ack on, 131; with Fala, 192–93; with Laddie Boy, 184, 189–91, 190, 198; prevention of cruelty to, 236; as runaway, 238; Soviet, 209 chimpanzees, 84, 88, 96 Christians, 156 Churchill, Winston, 185

circuses, 41–42, 44–45, 49, 52, 65, 99, 120 Civil War, U.S., 39, 133, 137, 230, 236 class issues, 10, 26, 29; and animals, 26, 29; in the ASPCA, 236–37; confl icts in England, 8, 156; of laboring class, 166, 237; of middle class, 90, 97, 133; of upper class, 164, 169, 238. See also gentlemen cockroaches, 254 Colbert, Gregory, 38 Cold War, 204–5; milestones of, 216; rivalries in, 206 colonization, 26; knowledge gathering and control, 123 Conservation and Research Center, Smithsonian Institution, 49 cougars, 247 Court Cabinet of Natural Specimens, 94 cows, 168 coyotes, 255 crawfi sh, 248 crayfi sh, 254 crocodile, Nile, 129, 131 Cronon, William, 110, 123 Crowninschield, Captain Jacob, 40, 43 cudgel, 163 Cumbria, UK, 264–73, 276; economy of, 266 Cumming, Roualeyn Gordon, 41, 42 Cuvier, Georges, 118–19 Darwin, Charles, 81, 99, 275; doctrine of, 89; ideas of, 92; portrayal of, 87–88; supporters of, 90; theory of, 93 Darwinism, 82, 89, 96, 97, 98; adaptation of, 82; anti-, 85, 88, 95; controversy over, 87; debate about, 87–88, 89, 94, 95. See also “zoo Darwinsim” deer, 22, 50, 67, 255, 257, 264 descent, question of, 90. See also Darwinism Descent of Man, The (Darwin), 87 Disneyland, 108–9 dogs, 190, 204–20, 229, 246, 254, 275; 287

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inde x dogs (continued) agency of, 205; bond between children and, 189; care of, 180, 217; central role of in Soviet space efforts, 210; emotions of, 181; experiments on, 213; as historical actors, 177, 205; as individuals, 181, 205, 213, 217; memorial to, 213; “normal” behavior of, 211, 216; owners of, 180, 184; as pets, 215; relationship with humans, 206, 220; rocket, 208, 209, 214; as servants and friends, 213; in Soviet space program, 206–20; training methods of, 157; treatment of, 213; “The War Dog,” 178; as “workers,” 217; in World War I, 178; in World War II, 206, 217. See also Fala; Laddie Boy; Laika; space dogs, Soviet Dogs for Defense Reserve, 184. See also Fala dolphins, 49, 53 domestication, 127, 170, 205; justification of, 157; landscape of, 275; ritual, 69, 70 donkeys, 229 drivers, of horse-drawn vehicles. See teamsters dung. See manure Dürer, Albrecht, 116–17, 119, 120 Durkheim, Émile, 22, 23 Easter egg roll (White House), 176, 184, 188–92, 198; history of, 188; news coverage of, 187. See also Laddie Boy ecology, 23, 25, 270, 271, 275 egrets, 248 eland, 41 election of 1944, 195. See also Roosevelt, President Franklin D. elephants, 4, 39–53, 108, 111, 121; memory of, 52, 56. See also Black Diamond (elephant), Chunee (elephant), and Jumbo (elephant) under animals: named Endangered Species Act, 142, 143, 145 England, 26; early modern, 155–71; treat-

ment of horses in, 158, 163, 165. See also Cumbria, UK; United Kingdom English colonists, 22, 26, 27 Enlightenment, the, 19, 96 entertainment, 44, 82, 98, 120 environmental history, 25, 27, 116, 274; advocates of, 128; in Europe, 274; in North America, 274–75 environmental movement, 140, 142 epistemology, 18, 28, 51; limitations of, 123 equine. See horses equity courts, 165 estate, 161, 166; records of, 160, 162, 170 ethics, 49, 53, 155 ethnography, 17; of human-wolf relations, 67; urban, 229 Europe, cities of: Cologne (Germany), 251; Fterra (Albania), 67–68; The Hague, 94; London (England), 160, 236, 239; Moscow (Russia), 208, 210, 214, 217; Naples (Italy), 162; Paris (France), 236, 237, 240; Star City (Russia), 218; Vienna (Austria), 81, 87, 100; Volgograd (Stalingrad, Russia), 207 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 28, 29, 32 Eve. See Bible fairs: sale of horses at, 156; toll books of, 161 Fala, 176–87, 182, 192–99; anthropomorphization of, 198; behavior of, 192, 197; biographical materials on, 181; biography of, 185; with children, 192–93; at conference on rural education, 196–97; custody struggle over, 186; disobedience of, 185; as family dog, 186, 196, 197, 199; at FDR’s inauguration, 185–86; national anthem and, 197–98; patriotism of, 196; performance of tricks by, 181, 192, 195, 196, 197, 199; personality and training of, 183; photographs of, 179, 184, 185, 186, 194; and politics, 195, 198; in the

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inde x presidential campaign of 1944, 176, 185, 192–97; private life of, 180, 181, 186; redefi nition of, 195; rumors about, 194–96; shift in public image of, 198; willingness to mingle, 193; and World War II, 184, 193, 194. See also Suckley, Margaret “Fala Exhibit,” 185 “Fala speech,” 192, 195–96; public reaction to, 195 Fala: The President’s Dog (fi lm), 192–93 farming, 74, 170, 196; industrialization of, 29, 30 Federov, Nikolai, 206 Fipps, der Affe (Busch), 92, 99 fi rst cats, 179 fi rst dogs, 176–99; as cultural construct, 176; emotional lives of, 180; fi rst press coverage of, 192; as historical subjects, 179; in peacetime, 183; portraits of, 177; public and private lives of, 176; responsibilities of, 191. See also Fala; Laddie Boy fi rst family, 176, 179, 180, 184, 185, 197, 199; representation of, 189 fi rst ladies, 176 fi sh, 53, 248 floodplains, 248–50, 254, 258; agricultural potential of, 252–53; invasion of, 249–50 floods, 246–58; on the Amazon River, 248; Black River (1937), 255; in California and Oklahoma, 248; control, 250; crop loss due to, 253; damages, 251; death of animals due to, 256, 257; increasing threat of, 249; Miami River (1913), 251; Mississippi River (1832), 254; Mississippi River (1882), 255; Mississippi River (1912), 256; Mississippi River (1923), 251; Mississippi River (1927), 254, 256, 257; Mississippi River (1937), 251, 255; Mississippi River (1993), 248, 257; Muskingum

River (1935), 253; Ohio River (1832), 254; Ohio River (1937), 246, 251, 253, 256, 257; refuge for animals in, 254–56; Rhine River (1882–83), 251; Susquehanna River (1936), 252 Florida, 127, 137, 140; Everglades, 141; Jacksonville, 133, 134, 137; population of, 128, 141; regulations in, 142; symbol of, 135; tourism in, 133, 139, 145; wild, 145 Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission, 132 foot-and-mouth disease, 264–66, 270, 275; official response to, 274 foxes, 271 free will, 157 freight, intra-urban, 231 frogs, 254; in space program, 206 fruit fl ies, in space program, 206, 211 fur, seal, 140 Gagarin, Yury, 204, 207, 212 gaming: laws, 166; officials, 142, 143 Garden of Eden, 156 Gartenlaube, Die, 83, 97, 98 gemsbok, 41 gentlemen, 159, 162, 167, 168, 171; close relationship to horses, 156 German Reich, 89 gibbons, 96, 100 giraffes, 41, 85 goats, 29, 67, 264 God, 20, 110, 156; acts of, 247; creation by, 163, 171; evidence of, 130 Goodall, Jane, 49, 56 gorillas, 84, 85, 85, 97, 108 “Great Chain of Being,” 157 guard dogs, of the GULAG, 206 Guide to the Lakes (Wordsworth), 271. See also Lake District, UK habitat, 10; of alligators, 8, 128, 132, 138, 140–42; in floodplains, 248–49, 258;

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inde x habitat (continued) preservation of, 272; of rhinoceros, 112, 115, 118, 119–20, 124. See also sanctuary Haeckel, Ernst, 86–87, 88, 99 Hagenbeck, Carl, 48, 84, 93 Hagenbeck, Heinrich, 45 Halfpenny, John, 159, 160 Harding, Florence, 183, 186, 189; kidney problems of, 187 Harding, President Warren G., 176, 179–92, 197–99; death of, 186, 199; dogs of (see Laddie Boy) Harding family, 186; political difficulty for, 187; social obligations of, 191 Heritage Lottery Fund, 272 herons, 248 Hildrop, John, 157 hippopotamuses, 108 Histoire Naturelle (Buffon), 117, 118, 119 hogs, 115, 254, 256 honor, codes of, 68–71 horns, 24, 28 horsemanship, 171; manuals, 156, 162, 167, 171 horsepower, 229–30, 239; use in transit, 227 horses, 25, 196, 151–71, 246, 255–56; anthropomorphization of, 235; as “biological machine,” 230, 233, 235; breeding of, 156, 228; built environment, influence on, 239–40; bureaucracy of, 231; carcasses of, 230, 251; in cities, 227, 234, 251; colts, 160–62; companionship of, 235; cruelty to, 162, 235–38; as dog meat, 169; draft , 227, 229, 237; fatigue of, 230; fi llies, 158–60; foals, 159–62; forms of resistance of, 238–39; hired, 171; hooves, 24; infection of, 167; injuries to, 163, 165, 167, 230; labor of, 227; leech, 167–68; management of, 156, 158, 163, 164, 171; maturation of, 162; memory of, 157; nobility of, 158; noise of, 238; owners, 167, 230; “personal,” 228; population of, 227; racing with,

167; revolution, 231; status of, 158, 166; superannuated, 168–69; technology, 228; trade, 156; training of, 156, 157, 161, 163, 233–34, 236; treatment of, 156, 160, 164, 165, 168, 171; use of, 156, 158, 169, 230, 251; working conditions of, 232–33 horseshoes, 228 Humane Education Society, 184 hunters, 29, 65, 66, 116, 247, 274; of alligators, 137, 142–44; disregard of crops by, 166; of elephants, 41–42, 44, 45, 49; -gatherers, 155; indigenous, 21, 27; Norwegian, 71, 72–74 hunting, 6, 25, 30, 171, 205, 272; abuses during, 164; of alligators, 128, 132, 138, 140–41, 143–44; with animals, 59; justification of, 157; licenses, 140; literature, 56; practices of animals, 63; for sport, 5 Hurricane Katrina. See United States, cities of: New Orleans (LA) husbandry, 26, 156, 168, 266, 276; goat, 68; manuals of, 161–62; sheep, 68 Huxley, Thomas, 86–87, 88 hyrax, 51 Iconologia (Ripa), 133 industrialization, 30, 229, 249 Institute for Health Research, Lancaster University, 265 Italy, foreign riders from, 161; manège, 162 Jackson, Wilson, 183, 187, 188, 189. See also “Master of Hounds” Jäger, Gustav, 88 jaguars, 51, 55 Jardin des Plantes, Paris, 94 jungle, 108, 123, 119–20; cultural construction of, 109, 110; mythology of, 108 Kennedy, John F., family of, 205, 212, 216 Khrushchev, Nikita, 205, 208 kinship, between humans and apes, 96, 97 knacker’s yard, 169

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Knauer, Friedrich, 88, 93, 96, 99 Korolev, Sergei, 207, 215 Kosmos, 110, 212 Kubelka, Peter, 42 Kulturkampf, 89 Lacey Act (1900), 143 Laddie Boy, 176–92, 197–99; affability of, 184; behavior of, 188; biographical materials on, 181; as celebrity, 184, 187, 188; with children, 184, 189–91, 190, 198; death of, 186; as disposable pet, 186, 187; as host of Easter egg roll, 176, 187–92; interview with, 190, 191; national anthem and, 197–98; performance by, 191; photographs of, 179, 191; and the press, 188; private life of, 180, 181, 186, 192; public role of, 189, 191, 192; training of, 183 Laika, 204–20; commemorations of, official, 218, 219; death of, 204, 210, 214–15; launch of, 207; legacy of, 218–20; photograph of, 209; resonance of story of, 206; role in space race, 205; sacrifice, symbol of, 206 Lake District, UK, 264–74; flora of, 273; human impact on, 271; as natural landscape, 270–71, 273; residents of, 265; sketch-map of, 267; tourism in, 265; transformation of, 274 landowners, Norwegian, 72, 73 landscape, 4, 10, 116; agricultural, 275; American, 136; construction of, 123; domesticated, 276; of domestication, 27, 275; Florida, 128, 132–35, 145; mythologized, 108; natural, 109–10, 119, 276; preservation of, 8; of the sublime, 119. See also Cuvier, Georges Langer, Carl, 93, 95 language: and animals, 1, 18–20, 38; of hunting literature, 56 Leutemann, Heinrich, 85–86 lions, 111 lion marmosets, 88

literature, children’s, 179, 185; anthropomorphization of animals in, 30; Laika in, 219 livestock, 59, 67, 68, 132, 246, 258, 275; breeding of in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 268; breeds of, 266, 268; British industry of, 264; in cities, 228; in Cumbria, 265, 266; in floods, rescue of, 55–56; losses of, 253; of settlers, 129 llamas, 111 lynxes, 247 macaques, 81, 82, 84 mad cow disease. See BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) Maggie, 182 Major, 182 mammoths, 51 manatees, 38 manège, 162 manuals: of horse training, 233; of stable management, 236 manure, 25, 230 mares, 159, 161; breaking in, 162 markets: sale of horses at, 156; toll books of, 161 Markham, Gervase, 159, 163 Marxism, 26 “Master of Hounds,” 183. See also Jackson, Wilson material traces, 23, 24, 26 meat, 25, 30, 156; justification of eating, 157 media, 49, 52, 114, 176, 179; alligator att acks in the, 132; animals in the, 2; and Darwinism, 82, 83, 87, 98–99; and fi rst dogs, 184; floods, coverage of, 252; “revolution,” 82; space dogs, coverage of, 204, 209, 212, 215–17 menageries, 111, 116; business of, 112; Dutch Stadholder, The Hague, 84; in early nineteenth century, 119; traveling, 84, 94 Meynert, Professor, 93, 95 291

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mice, in space program, 211 missing link, 99 modernity, 47, 55 monkey house: in Berlin, 83; criticism of design of, 84; Schönbrunn, 90, 91, 92 “monkey question,” 98 monkeys, 81, 82, 87, 99, 100; brain of, 93, 94–95, 96; controversies, influence of, 82; representation of, 98; in space programs, 206, 207. See also apes “monkey theory,” 86–87, 89, 97; visual depiction of, 87, 91 morality, 20, 21, 47, 51, 59, 69, 70, 89, 109; judgment of, 157 morphology, 97 Mouflon. See sheep: Herdwick: descendance of mules, 246, 254, 255, 257 musrolls, misuse of, 163 mythology: creatures of, 121; local, 114; and science, 120; secular, 112 National Canine Defense League, 209, 217 national parks, 49 Native Americans, 22, 26, 27, 137; Blackfoot, 25; Crow, 25; female, 133; Natchez, 137 natural catastrophe: and animals, 247, 251; anthropogenic causes of, 247. See also floods natural history, 24, 41, 50, 63 natural history museum, 51, 42, 65; of Tirana, 67; of Vienna, 87, 93 Natural History of Mammals (Brodtmann), 118–19 natural instincts, 247 naturalists, 96, 129, 131, 141, 142, 143. See also Pliny the Elder natural resources, commodification of, 136 Naturalis Historia (Pliny the Elder), 114 nature: agency of, 27, 128; American experience of, 110; and animals, 18, 25, 29, 49, 274, 275; and civilization, 228, 230, 249; commodification of,

126; constructions of (scientific), 120; constructions of (urban), 74; and culture, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 17, 20, 25, 92, 116, 123, 124, 128–29; documentaries of, 49, 52; extension of, 207; -lovers, 140, 141, 236 (see also Audubon Society; Olmsted, Frederick Law); order imposed on, 8; production of, 271; the sublime in, 124; truth in, 121, 123; writers, 120, 132; the wild in, 119, 122. See also Lake District, UK; Thoreau, Henry David nematodes, in space program, 206 New York Times, 238; on elephants, 52; on Fala, 179, 186, 194–95; on flooding, 249, 252, 255, 256; on Laddie Boy, 189; on space dogs, 208, 209 North America, 25, 26, 27, 129; western, 274. See also United States, states and regions of Norway, 71–74 Nuer, 28, 29, 32 Nuer, The (Evans-Pritchard), 28, 29, 32 Old Testament, 130 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 236, 240 ontology, 18, 23, 24, 28 orangutans, 81, 82, 92, 93, 96, 97, 111; cadaver of, 93, 94; fi rst in Europe, 84; physical development of, 85; skulls of, 96. See also Madame Sophie (orangutan) and Miss Bessy (orangutan) under animals: named “ordinary common sense,” 177, 180 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 82, 83, 86, 96, 97, 275. See also Darwinism otters, 271, 273 outer space. See space (universe) Owen, Richard, 96 oxen, 28, 29, 32, 158, 229 Oxford English Dictionary, 39 pastoralists, 29 patriotism. See Fala; Laddie Boy Pavlov, Ivan, 205, 213

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inde x Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), 44 pets, 30, 31, 49, 230, 258, 275; abilities and att ributes of, 180; food of, 30; keeping of, 181, 217 pigs, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 246, 264 pine martens, 271–72, 273 Pliny the Elder, 114, 116, 120; as naturalist, 130 poachers, of rhinoceros, 109, 143, 144 polar bears, 111 polecats, 272 popularizers of science, 97 porcupines, 81 posting, 165 postmasters, 165 postmodernism, 19, 20, 49 Potter, Beatrix, 272. See also Lake District, UK presidents (American), 176, 185, 187; biography of, 180; gift s of dogs to, 181. See also Harding, President Warren G.; Roosevelt, President Franklin D. press (American), 211; reaction to Sputnik 1 in, 208. See also media press (Soviet), 211, 215; discussion of the dogs in the, 213, 216. See also media press conference, space dogs as subject of, 211, 212, 216 pulling carts. See vehicles, horse-drawn pygmies, 96 raccoons, 257 racehorses. See horses racing, 165, 171 railway: companies, 234; networks, 227; street, 231 rams, 29 Rappaport, Roy, 23, 29 Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST), 266, 275 rats, in space program, 206, 211 ratt lesnakes, 254 “Redbook,” 142

reins, 233 relation, human-animal, 181, 232, 247; history of, 177; in the humanities, 61–63, 65, 75 relation, human-dog, 180, 199 relation, human-horse, 232 revisionists, 169 Rhine River, 250, 251 rhinoceros, 46, 108–24, 113, 117, 118; advertisements for, 113, 119; behavior of, 112–13, 115; black, 45, 46; captive, 114–16; cultural images of, 109, 116, 119, 120, 124; habitat of, 115, 118, 120, 124; Indian, 109, 116; myth of, 109, 110, 122, 123; as performer, 120; public response to, 115; “rhinomania,” 117; “ugliness” of, 116, 119; violence of, 112, 114–15; wildness of, 109, 112, 122 rider, 161, 165; foreign, 161; inhumane treatment of horses by, 163 Ritvo, Harriet, 4–5, 10, 53, 55, 96 rod, in equine management, 163–64 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 182, 186, 192, 194, 197; in 1944 election, 195, 196; humanization of, 197; relationship with Fala, 183, 198 Roosevelt, President Franklin D., 176, 178–87, 182, 192–99; death of, 181, 186, 187, 198; dogs of, 195 (see also Fala; Major); at Easter services at Fort Riley, 193; humor of, 196; “inspection tour,” 192–93, 194, 196; reelection campaign of, 192, 194, 195–96. See also “Fala speech” Roosevelt, Theodore, 41, 42 Royal Agricultural Society, 268 Russia. See Soviet Union sanctuary, 49; elephant, 44 satellite, 204, 208, 210; American, 210 Schaulust, 84 seeing: anthropoid apes, 89–90; elephants, 39–41. See also Schaulust serpents, 121 293

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inde x servants, 156, 171; mistreatment of horses by, 166 sheep, 29, 59, 67, 72, 180, 256; New Leicester, 268; Norwegian farmer of, 72, 73–74; shepherds’ relationship with, 66; slaughter of, 264; —Herdwick, 265, 266–71, 273, 276; connection to the landscape, 270, 273; descendance of, 269–70; description of, 270; flock book of, 268; hardiness of, 266–68; independence of, 273; in the press, 266; prestige of, 269; prizes for, 268; as symbol, 273 shepherds, 59, 66; in Albania, 68–71, 73; emasculation of, 70–71 shops: owners, 134; tourist, 135, 139 “significant otherness,” 205, 206 slavery, 27 social codes, 69, 71 soldiers. See under World War II soul, 157; of animals, 158 Soviet Union, 204, 207, 208, 211, 214, 217; att itude toward space dogs, 213; children of, 209; citizens of, 206; media in, 208, 209, 213, 216–17; scientists, 210; war effort of, 217. See also space dogs, Soviet; space program, Soviet space (concept of), 26–30 space (universe), 205, 207, 211; capsules, 207, 210; race, 205, 208, 212; travel in, 206–8 space dogs, Soviet, 204–20; Belianka, 210; Belka, 204, 211, 214, 216; “branding” of, 218; celebrity of, 205–6, 213, 215–16, 217, 220; Chernushka, 212; Dezik, 207–8; Kudriavka, 208; legacy of, 213; Malyshka, 208; memorabilia of, 219, 220; media coverage of, 204, 209, 212, 215–17; Otvazhnaia, 210; Pestraia, 210; role in space race, 205; sacrifice of, 205, 214–15; Strelka, 204, 211, 214, 216; —, puppies of (e.g., Pushinka), 204, 212, 216; training of, 210, 214; Tsygan,

208, 214; Ugolek, 212; Veterok, 212; Zvezdochka, 212. See also Laika space dog program, Soviet, 205, 215; hallmarks of, 212; records of, 212 space program, Soviet, 212, 206; public discussion of, 215. See also space dogs, Soviet spectacle, 30, 41 spiders, 248 sportsmen, of alligators, 131, 133, 140–41 spurs, 163 Sputnik 1, 208, 215 Sputnik 2, 204, 209–10 squirrels: red, 272–73; Sciurus carolinensis, 272 stables: keepers of, 167; livery, 167; urban, 238 Stalin, Joseph, 207; death of, 208 status symbols: foreign riders as, 161; horses as, 163 steed, nobility of, 156 stirrups, 25, 163 stoats, 271 street-tram, owners of, 228, 234–35 Studebaker, 232 sublime, the, 120, 121, 122, 123; landscape of, 119 Suckley, Margaret, 178, 181, 185, 186, 187, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198; journal of, 192–93. See also Fala Systema Naturae (von Linné), 96 taphonomy, 25 Tass (Soviet news agency), 209, 210 taxidermists, 139 taxonomy, 53, 275 teamsters, 165, 228, 232, 234–38; black and Irish, 232; and large corporations, 234–35; relation with employers, 237; responsibilities of, 233; striking, 235 theory of decent, 81 theory of evolution, 81, 82, 88, 89, 95,

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97, 99; simplification of, 98. See also Darwinism theriophilism: posturing, 156; thinking, 158; writers of, 163, 170, 171 “theriophobia,” 129 Thoreau, Henry David, 121–22 Thurston, Robert, 229 tigers, 81 Tikhonravov, Mikhail, 208, 215 Times (London), 210 toll books, 161–62, 168 tortoises, 121; in space program, 206 totemism, 21–22 touch, sense of, 38–58 tourism, 108; in Florida, 134; of the Lake District, 265, 271 trappers, 144, 145; provocation by, 132 Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (Bartram), 130 troglodytes, 96 Tsembaga tribe, 23, 29 tsetse fly, 25 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 206 Tyron, Thomas, 165, 169 unicorn, 112, 113 United Kingdom, 264–76. See also England United States, cities of: Baltimore (MD), 232; Boston (MA), 110, 231, 234, 238, 239, 240; Buffalo (NY), 240; Chicago (IL), 232, 233, 246; Columbia (MO), 255; Dayton (OH), 251; Evansville (IN), 246; flood devastation of, 252; Hyde Park (NY), 181, 182, 183, 187; Louisville (KY), 240, 257; New Orleans (LA), 252; New York (NY), 232, 236, 237, 238, 239; nineteenth-century, 228, 240; Philadelphia (PA), 232; Pitt sburgh (PA), 232, 234, 238; Renville (ND), 250; Seatt le (WA), 235; Stanley (KY), 246; St. Louis (MO), 232;

Vicksburg (MI), 254, 255; Washington, D.C., 238 United States, rivers of: Mississippi, 248, 251; Missouri, 255; Muskingum, 253; Ohio, 246, 249, 250, 251, 253; St. John’s, 131, 133–34; Souris, 250; Susquehanna, 252; Yadkin, 256. See also floods United States, states and regions of: Great Plains, 25; Louisiana, 127, 131, 140, 142, 144; New York, 139; Okefenokee (GA), 141; southeastern, 127, 130. See also Florida University of Florida, 135 University of Vienna, 95 urbanization, 25, 228, 249 U.S. Department of Agriculture, 250 U.S. Department of Commerce, 137 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, 142, 144 vegetarianism, 49 vehicles, horse-drawn, 165, 231–33, 239; breaking with, 234–35 veterinary knowledge, 168 Vikings, 269, 271 violence, working-class, towards workhorses, 237 Virchow, Rudolf, 94, 95 visitors, 97; interaction with animals, 83, 84; to zoological gardens, 83, 84, 88, 90, 92 vivisection, 5, 157 wagons. See vehicles, horse-drawn watching/observation, 45 water bugs, 254 weasels, 271 West Cumberland Fell Dales Sheep Association, 268 whales, 38, 49, 52 whips, 233, 235, 237. See also horses: cruelty to White House, the, 176, 182, 187, 188, 191, 196, 199; burdens of, 190; busyness of,

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inde x White House (continued) 183; expectations of dogs at, 183; Fala in, 185–86; lawn, 180, 184; staff of, 179. See also Easter egg roll (White House) “Why Look at Animals?” (Burger), 65 wilderness, 109–10; in Florida, 133; perceptions of in environmental history, 274; place of, 122, 123; and time, 110 wildlife: conservation of, 140, 142; decimation of, 134; population control, 49–50 wildness, 109–10; abstract ideology of, 123; changing aesthetic of, 120; of colts, 160; construction of, 110, 122–23; as foreign, 109; of the Lake District, 271; as refuge, 120; of rhinoceros, 115; sublime, 123; after Thoreau, 121–22 Wilhelm I, Kaiser, 45, 89 wolves, 59–75, 129, 272; colonization of, 72; cultural construction of, 66, 67, 68, 74; hatred of, 68, 69; “in shepherd’s clothing,” 60; killing of, 70, 71; as outsider, 69; protective legislation of, 74; social life of, 63; “urban,” 74; “wolf war,” 73 workhorses. See horses World War I, service dogs in, 178 World War II, 183, 184, 185, 198, 206, 207, 272; ambitions after, 207; pet keeping after, 217; service dogs in, 206; soldiers in, 193. See also Roosevelt, President Franklin D.: “inspection tour”

Youatt , William, 267, 269. See also sheep: Herdwick “zoo Darwinism,” 82, 99, 100 zoo director: as propagator of evolution, 88. See also Brühl, Carl Bernhard; Knauer, Friedrich Zoological Society, 96. See also Owen, Richard zoologists, 85, 89, 97, 99. See also Begu, Ferdinand; Brühl, Carl Bernhard; Jäger, Gustav; Knauer, Friedrich zoology, racist narrative in, 99 zoos and zoological gardens, 29, 30, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 65, 120; Animal Park, Hagenbeck’s, 45, 48; Berlin (see Berlin “Aquarium”); Cologne, 85, 251; and Darwinism, 81–100; Düsseldorf, 83; enclosures in, 120; in floods, 251–52; Frankfurt, 93, 97; Hanover, 92; Imperial Zoological Museum, 93; Kingston Zoo (PA), 251; Lincoln Park (Chicago), 43; London, 43; Manchester (NH) Zoo, 251; Menagerie Stiglitz, 84; Milwaukee County, 44; Prater Zoological Garden (Vienna), 83, 88, 90, 96, 99; production of knowledge in, 95; public demand for, 97; Regent’s Park Zoo (London), 96; Royal Zoological Museum of Dresden, 85, 86, 92, 94, 97, 99; Schönbrunn Menagerie (Vienna), 81, 83, 84, 89, 92, 97, 99, 100 Zuckerkandl, Emil, 93, 94, 95, 96

Yazdovsky, Vladimir, 207, 213, 214

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