Forest History Society, Oxford University Press, American Society For Environmental History Environmental History

Animal Planet
Author(s): Harriet Ritvo

Source: Environmental History, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Apr., 2004), pp. 204-220
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Forest History Society and American
Society for Environmental History
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HARRIET RITVO
animal
PLANET
IT IS HARD TO COUNT the ways in which other animals figure in the stories that
environmental historians tell.1 They are part of our epic tales-those with the
longest chronological reach-about the movements of early hunters and gatherers.
They are part of the grand narrative of domestication and the transformation of
human existence through agriculture. They often have represented nature
(however nature has been understood) in religious and scientific thought. Animals
also play a large role in our novellas-that is, accounts of distinctively modern
concerns (or distinctively modern variations on these age-old themes), such as
species loss through habitat destruction, the simplification of ecosystems
through monoculture and invasion, and the modification of organisms by means
of biotechnology. Their ubiquitous presence has helped establish the city and
the suburb as appropriate settings for environmental history. None of these
stories-long or short-has yet come to a definitive conclusion: Certainly, at least
from the perspective of the animals themselves, no happy endings are in sight.
That may be one reason that animals have been appearing with increasing
frequency in the work of environmental historians and of scholars in related
disciplines. Another may be that many of the difficult issues at the intersection
of academic studies of the environment (historical or otherwise) and
environmental politics have an animal dimension, or even an animal-triggered
flashpoint: preservation of threatened ecosystems, overexploitation of resources
such as fisheries, emergent diseases, and cloning, to name a few.
Environmental historians are not alone in their heightened interest in
animals, nor is scholarly attention to animals completely new. Livestock
traditionally has attracted the attention of economic historians who focus on
agriculture. Important animal-related institutions, from humane societies to zoos,
have had their chroniclers. The history of zoology is a well-established branch of
ANIMAL PLANET 1 205
Figure 1. Dodo.
Richard Lydekker, ed., The Royal Natural History, 6 vols. (London: Fredenck Warne, 1895), IV, 388.
The dodo, one of the earliest acknowledged extinctions.
the history of science, most conspicuously in relation to the development of

evolutionary ideas. People distinguished in their association with animals,
whether as breeders or hunters or scientists, have had their biographers, as,
indeed, have some animals distinguished in their own right-from Jumbo to
Seabiscuit. Historians have investigated the moral and legal rights and
responsibilities of animals, as well as animal-related practices, such as
vivisection.2
Nevertheless during the last several decades, the attitude of historians in
general toward the study of animals has shifted significantly: To put it briefly,
animals have been edging toward the mainstream. No longer is the mention of
an animal-related research topic likely to provoke surprise and amusement, as
was the case twenty years ago. There is now enough new work and enough interest
in reading it to support a book series on the theme of "Animals, History, Culture,"
published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, and a series of annual edited
volumes, the Colloques d'histoire des connaissances zoologiques, published at
the University of Liege in Belgium. There are several ways to understand this
shift. Animals can be seen as the latest beneficiaries of a democratizing tendency
within historical studies. As the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and
the women's movement inspired sympathetic scholars, so have, in their turn, the
advocates of hunted whales, poached tigers, abandoned dogs, and overcrowded
pigs. Even in fields like agricultural history, where animal topics have been
routine, farmyard creatures have become less likely to be abstracted through
quantification, and more likely to appear as individuals, or at least groups of
individuals. Straws in this wind include Susan D. Jones's recent study of veterinary
treatment of livestock and horses, and the conference on "The Chicken: Its
206 1 ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 9 (APRIL 2004)
Biological, Social, Cultural, and Industrial History, from the Neolithic Middens
to McNuggets," sponsored in 2oo2 by the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies.3 In
addition, of course, the vigorous growth of environmental history has helped
direct the attention of other kinds of historians toward animals.
At least in the United States, environmental history originally developed from
the history of the frontier. The field has moved away from these pioneer
beginnings, both geographically and theoretically, as is perhaps most clearly
indicated by the gradual problematization of the concept of wilderness. But
concern with the relation between the sphere of human domination and what
lies (or seems to lie) outside remains strong. This concern often has been mediated
through the study of the relationship between people and wild animals, a focus
that links modern ways of living with those of our earliest ancestors. The longest
story ever told-at least the longest one with people as characters-chronicles the
development of human cultures and societies. It exists in numerous variants,
depending, among other things, on whether the story is limited to Homo sapiens,
or whether it includes extinct congeners like H. neanderthalensis and H. habilis,
or stretches still further back to the australopithecines, or moves laterally to
embrace our living pongid cousins. All versions agree, however, on the importance
of predation. Even if, as with the chimpanzees studie'd by Jane Goodall, hunting
was a relatively infrequent activity, and meat an occasional dietary supplement
rather than a dependable source of calories, the skill and cooperation required to
kill small and medium-sized game provided significant social and intellectual
stimulation.4 In most pre-agricultural human groups, hunting was more routine
and more important. The archaeological record suggests that small nomadic
groups also had to worry about becoming the objects of other creatures' hunts,
which doubtless served in a complementary way to sharpen wits and enhance
cooperation.5
In addition, hunting provides the earliest example of the disproportionate
human power to affect the rest of the environment. Even though prehistoric
human populations were relatively small, they may have had a significant impact
on the large herbivores who provided the most rewarding and challenging
objectives and, secondarily, on the large carnivores who also ate them. It
frequently has been argued, most conspicuously by the biologist Edward 0.
Wilson, that the spread of modern humans outside their African homeland caused
the rapid decline and, in many cases, the extinction of large animal species (and
even genera) along their paths of migration.6 Certainly the coincidence between
the arrival of H. sapiens in Australia, North America, and South America and the
subsequent impoverishment of their indigenous megafauna is very suggestive,
especially as these continents, in contrast to Eurasia-where the impact of modern
humans appears to have been less dramatic-had not been inhabited by earlier
hominid species. This account has always been controversial, however, for several
reasons. Inevitably, evidence is sparse and the argument relies heavily on
inference. To acknowledge that small pre-agricultural human groups could have
such an overwhelming impact on large animal species is to acknowledge that
there was never any period or state of human society that existed in a completely
ANIMAL PLANET 2 0 7
Figure 2. Wild Boar.
James Edmund Harting, British Animals Extinct within Historic Times (London: Trnbner, 1880), 77.
The wild boar was extinct in England by the end of the Middle Ages.
harmonious or static relation to the rest of the environment-literally or

metaphorically, no garden of Eden. Reluctance to relinquish this notion accounts
for some of the emotion provoked by Shepard Krech's suggestion that
PaleoIndians bore some responsibility for the Pleistocene extinctions in North
America.7 There are possible alternative explanations, of which the most
prominent is that the same climatic changes that encouraged human migration,
especially into the Americas, also altered the habitats to which the enormous
Pleistocene animals had adapted. From this perspective, the cold-adapted fauna
ultimately was displaced by competitors better-suited to a more temperate
climate.8 It is probably an indication of the enduring fascination of these animals,
even to people with no opportunity or desire to hunt them, that the cause of their
extinction has inspired learned and popular debate since their rediscovery in the
nineteenth century.9
In many respects, the activities of modern hunters resemble those of their
earliest forebears. In an overview of hunting from the Pleistocene to the present,
Matt Cartmill has shown how, nevertheless, those activities have altered or been
contested, along with shifting understandings of nature. The hunter has figured
variously as heroic provider, as protector of threatened outposts, as sensitive
intermediary between the human and the divine prey, as gallant sportsman, as
brutal butcher, and as agent of extinction."0 The last two epithets are the most
208 I ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 9 (APRIL 2004)
Figure 3. Quagga.
W. B. Tegetmeier & C. L Suherland, Horses, Asses, Zbras, Mules, and Mule Bredirng (Lodon: Horace CoM 1 W5),
Quaggas, once common in southern Afnca, vanished in the second half of the nineteenth century.
recent, and they have become increasingly prominent in the course of the last
century or so. This is not to suggest that no animal species had been eliminated
between the Pleistocene and the late nineteenth century, at least on a local basis.
In Britain, for example, the wolf, the bear, the wild boar, and the beaver
disappeared as a result of the activities of medieval hunters, and, with the possible
exception of the beaver, they were not regretted. On the contrary, their absence
was greatly appreciated. The last aurochs, the wild bovines from which
domesticated cattle are descended, died in Poland in the seventeenth century,
not long before the last dodos were killed on Mauritius. Their passing engaged
the interest of naturalists and antiquaries, but it was not until the great imperial
expansion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the diminution and
disappearance of animal populations began to arouse concern.
Commercial interests raised the first real alarm. Overexploitation radically
reduced the productivity of the North American fur trade from the middle of the
eighteenth century, when the annual harvest of Canadian beaver skins was over
150,000, to the early nineteenth century, when a territory four times as large
provided one-third the yield."' Naturalists and hunters (often the same people
wearing different hats) corroborated this worrisome sense that even substantial
animal populations might not be indefinitely resilient. Visitors to the Cape Colony
at the southern tip of Africa observed that neither naturalists nor hunters could
find much to amuse them, and that one species of antelope, the blaubok, had
been killed off completely; similar complaints were made with regard to the parts
of India most accessible to colonial sportsmen. Extinction even of more numerous
species was ultimately recognized as a real possibility (a recognition that was
inconsistent with some versions of creationist theology, although not so
ANIMAL PLANET 1 209
*-...... .....
Figure 4. North American Bison.
.~ ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. . ......
A a . . ..:.... ... .. 2. '. _
Samuel W. Baker, Wild Beasts a
Buffalo hunting tales were still being published after the species was feared to be extinct.
troublesomely inconsistent as evolution proved to be). As formerly blank spaces

on the map were filled in, the sparseness or complete absence of wild animals
from areas where they had formerly been abundant no longer could be explained
as their retreat to the unknown interior. Response to these dawning perceptions
was mixed. Like Theodore Roosevelt several generations later, many enthusiastic
sportsmen accepted the diminution of game as part of the march of progress.
Throughout the nineteenth century, authorities in many parts of the world
subsidized the extermination of wild animals perceived as threats to or economic
competitors with farmers and their livestock.12
The near disappearance of the vast North American bison herds in the middle
of the nineteenth century, followed by the actual disappearance of the quagga, a
close relative of the zebra, from southern and eastern Africa, began to convert
perception into action. Still symbolic of uncivilized nature, wild game was
transformed from an obstacle into a valuable resource in need of protection.
Yellowstone National Park was founded in 1872 to protect the remaining animals;
for several decades the success of this endeavor remained in doubt.13 Yellowstone
and the many reserves and national parks that followed it represented a novel
twist on an old idea. Restricted game parks had a long history in Europe and in
parts of Asia where their purpose had been at least as much to defend the
exclusiveness of hunting as to preserve the animal targets. This spirit permeated
the preservation laws that were enacted by many British colonies in Africa and
Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They often specified
differential access, quotas, and licensing fees, clearly privileging colonial officials
and visiting dignitaries over both indigenous inhabitants and humble European
settlers. They also discriminated among animal species, so that large carnivores
Figure 5. Thylacine.
Richard Lydekker, A Handbook to the Marsupialia and Monotremnata (London. Edward Lloyd, 1896), opp. 152.
The thylacine was lamented only after it was late.
were excluded from the protective umbrella; indeed their slaughter was often
encouraged with bounties. This complex of motives and goals was embodied in
1S~~~~~~~~~i
the "Conventions for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds, and Fish in Africa,"
which was signed in London in i900 by representatives of various European
governments with colonial holdings, although most of them subsequently failed
to ratify it or to honor its provisions. The Society for the Preservation of the Wild
Fauna of the Empire, founded in 1903 by a distinguished group of sportsmen and
colonial administrators, proved more durable, although (or perhaps because) its
membership encompassed strongly conflicting viewpoints. By the time of the
society's diamond anniversary, the authors of its official history characterized
these early members as "penitent butchers."14
Efforts to protect wild animal populations have continued to provoke conflict,
both internal and external. Some early campaigners for wild bird preservation
wore elaborate feather hats, and so opened themselves to criticism as hypocrites
(by the unconvinced) or as dilettantes (by their more rigorousely logical
coadjutors).15 Poaching was an issue when game was protected only for the
entertainment of elite hunters, and it continued to be an issue after the animals
also became intended beneficiaries.1 Nor was the need for wild animal protection
universally acknowledged. In many places, competing human interests,
alternative sources of information, and inconsistent official motivations meant
that protections were not enforced or even enacted until targeted populations
were severely reduced or entirely gone. Thus the last thylacine (also known as the
Tasmanian tiger and the marsupial wolf) died in a zoo in 1936. Legal protection
for its species in Tasmania was enacted just fifty-nine days before it expired
(thylacines had been hunted to extinction on the Australian mainland long before
any Europeans set foot there). Subsequently the thylacine has been the object of
a great deal of apparently heartfelt but inevitably impotent regret.'7 The fate of
ANIMAL PLANET I 211
the tiger in Indonesia and Malaysia depended on the opinions of a variety of

colonized and colonizing groups, possibly in addition, Peter Boomgaard gently
suggests, to those of the tigers themselves."8 And individuals always could change
their minds-or be of several minds. In Man-Eaters of Kumaon, Jim Corbett
chronicled his triumphs over numerous lethal tigers, mostly in the classic
colonialist mode: That is, claiming to protect Indian villagers who could not
defend themselves. By the time of its original publication during World War II,
he had become an ardent conservationist (a national park in the Himalayan
foothills was named in his honor after he died-in 1973, Project Tiger, which aims
to save the tiger from extinction, was founded there), yet he wrote for a public
that thrilled to the chase and the kill.'9 Very recent history offers many more
examples of competing human claims to the resources represented by wild
animals. Eating Apes by Dale Peterson explores one of the most extreme and
problematic cases.20
If hunting represents the primeval relationship between humans and the rest
of the animal kingdom, then domestication represents the most transformative
one, from the perspectives of both the domesticators and the domesticatees. With
the possible single exception of the dog, which may have been part of human
social groups long before people began to settle down, animals were domesticated
in conjunction with the development of agriculture. The period when domesticated
dogs first appeared and the means by which wolves became dogs are highly
controversial. Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger argue strongly that dog
domestication was an indirect product of early agriculture-that is, that dogs who
were inclined to scavenge in village waste sites domesticated themselves, much
as cats inclined to hunt in rodent-infested grain stores did several thousand years
later. Other zoologists prefer explanations that emphasize the human penchant
for adopting wild pets and the similar hunting practices of humans and canids.21
But cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, horses, donkeys, camels, and llamas all were
domesticated by agriculturalists or proto-agriculturalists. It is a commonplace
of the most sweeping environmental histories that, although domesticated
animals were not essential to the development of agriculture, they made a
tremendous difference. They supplemented human labor, enhanced
transportation, and provided skins and fiber, as well as meat and milk (and
selective pressure in favor of the evolution of adult lactose tolerance in some
human groups).22 They have often been identified by contemporary historians as
the reason for the competitive success of societies ultimately derived from ancient
southwest Asia, especially in comparison with the indigenous societies of the
Americas and Oceania. In the nineteenth century, racialist thinkers sometimes
read this comparison in reverse, and used the absence of domesticated animals
or even the failure to domesticate a particular kind of animal, as a way of
denigrating human groups. Africans, for example, were criticized for not taming
the elephant, which had proved so valuable in Asia.
Like most aspects of what is normally celebrated as progress, the
domestication of animals had a downside, although the connection was not
recognized until much later. Archaeological evidence suggests that small nomadic
groups were relatively untroubled by the contagious diseases that repeatedly have
decimated most settled communities. The size and the mobility of these groups
had contributed to this happy situation, and both these attributes altered as people
settled down to farm. Increased population meant larger reservoirs for disease
and fixed residences meant permanent proximity to waste, whether disposed of
in middens or in nearby watercourses. If people had domesticated only plants,
these changes would only have exposed them more intensively to disease
organisms that they already harbored. But the domestication of wild ungulates-
animals which, though mobile, lived in groups large enough to incubate
contagions-brought people into contact with a new set of diseases. Such human
diseases as smallpox and measles-and diseases of other domestic animals, such
as cat and dog distemper-resulted from contact with viruses that originally
caused livestock diseases.23 Over the millennia, it has been theorized by
environmental historians, all but the most isolated old world populations became
accustomed to these diseases. Their social impact was minimized through
childhood exposure and their individual impact was possibly reduced through
maternally transmitted or inherited resistance.24 But the human inhabitants of
the Americas, who had left northeast Asia before the domestication of herds or
flocks, had not enjoyed this protracted opportunity to adapt to the microbial
cocktail to which European adventurers began to expose them in the late fifteenth
century.25 Most environmental historians of the contact have concluded that this
exposure caused the dramatic drop in indigenous populations throughout the
Americas in the ensuing centuries, although David Jones has recently suggested
that social factors should be weighted more heavily.26
Of course epidemic disease was not the only effect that old world animals had
on new world people. More direct, or at least more obvious, was the impact of the
animals themselves, many of which escaped and multiplied vigorously in
favorable habitats throughout the Americas. Elinor Melville characterizes such
enthusiastic adaptations as ungulate irruptions. Unlike that of contagions, their
impact was mixed. As they had done in Europe, Asia and North Africa, these animals
provided food, power, and transportation to indigenous people as well as to colonists,
while also subjecting some fragile environments to unsustainable strains.27
Although vaccines against most of these ancient scourges had been developed
by the late twentieth century, and it had even become possible to contemplate the
absolute extinction of a few of them, human epidemiological vulnerability to our
vast dense populations of meat animals is not a thing of the past. Influenza
returns each year, slightly reengineered in southeast Asia-probably a product of
the mode of farming practiced there, in which people, chickens, pigs, and wild
fowl live in sufficient proximity for their flu viruses to trade genetic material.
Epidemiologists watched the avian flu that decimated flocks of chickens last
winter with apprehension based only partly on fear of its economic impact on the
poultry industry and on the few cases in which it spread (lethally) to people. They
realized that the virus that caused the influenza pandemic of 1918 was derived
from a different bird virus that developed the ability to infect mammals; possibly
its avian origins made it more difficult for people to resist. Nor do animals need
ANIMAL PLANET I 213
to be domesticated to transmit zoonotic disease, although when wild animals

play this role, they usually have been incorporated into human economy if not
human society. Thus SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), which shut down
travel to east Asia and to Toronto in 2003, apparently has been traced to civets, as
AIDS has been traced to non-human African primates (both chimpanzees and
monkeys). In each case, the attribution of responsibility has a blame-the-victim
aspect.
The most compelling recent episode of zoonotic transmission is mad cow
disease or BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), an affliction that clearly
was produced by human practices and human politics. The disease, which spread
widely among British cattle in the 1g8os-and in a limited number of cases to
members of other species, including humans and cats-seems to have originated
in cattle feed enriched with material from sheep carrying scrapie, a similar
disease.28 Although feeding cattle with material derived from fellow ungulates-
a practice denounced by some excitable critics as enforced cannibalism-is not
traditional, in a sense it represents an extension of a well-established technique.
Since the eighteenth century, livestock farmers have attempted to streamline the
inherently inefficient diets of their animals. Cattle fed on food like oilcake, a
much richer source of calories than the grass they evolved to metabolize, matured
earlier and gained weight faster, and thus became marketable more rapidly and
more profitably. But if physical factors produced BSE, it was the Conservative
British government of the 198os that turned the disease into an epizootic. A
philosophy that defined government as the protector of commercial enterprise
rather than of its citizens meant that official concern with beef industry profits
consistently overshadowed official concern with public health. Further, the British
response to BSE (shared by some members of the public as well as government
officials) was shaped by such elusive factors as national pride and national
passion. Of course, any significant commodity can serve as a metonym for the
nation that produces or consumes it, but animals have been particularly likely to
fill such roles, and beef and beef cattle had occupied a particularly powerful
emblematic position in Britain for several hundred years.29 Not only were citizens
urged to show their patriotism by continuing to eat British burgers, but non-
British responses often suggested reciprocal national feeling. Thus the stalwart
commitment proclaimed by other European governments to defend the health of
their citizens against the British bovine menace could seem less absolute when
BSE was rumored in their own herds. Although American politicians recently
have taken alarm at a single detected case, rather than waiting, as was the case
in Britain, for animals to succumb in their tens of thousands, they seem similarly
inclined to view protection of the beef industry as their first priority, and to use
the national border to distinguish among cattle suffering from the same affliction.
The vulnerability of livestock to diseases also has affected the human
environment in various non-epidemic ways. That is, epizootics, such as outbreaks
of cattle plague or foot and mouth disease, repeatedly have wreaked economic
havoc without making people sick. Since both cattle and horses are susceptible
to sleeping sickness, the prevalence of the tse tse fly made it difficult for the
Figure 6. New Leicester Sheep.
j. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~X
Thomas Bewick, A General History of Quadrupeds (Newcastle: T. Bewick, 1824), 63.
Robert Bakewell produced the celebrated New Leicester improved breed of sheep.
European biological assemblage, which had proved so effective in expediting the

colonization of. the temperate Americas and Australia, to move into large tracts
of Africa. The waste produced by industrial concentrations of animals in
stockyards and factory farms continues to strain sewage facilities. Nevertheless,
as greatly as domesticated animals have influenced human existence, our impact
on them has been greater still. Simply in terms of numbers, these few favored
species now account for a much larger proportion of the world's biomass than
did their pre-agricultural ancestors. In several cases-the camel and the cow-the
wild progenitors of domesticates have disappeared. In others, such as the wolf,
their populations are dwarfed by those of their domesticated relatives. If Canis
familiaris were to be reclassified as C. lupus on the basis of willingness to
interbreed and ability to produce fertile hybrid offspring, it would be difficult to
argue for the protection of the wolf as an endangered species. So domestication
has given target species an enormous evolutionary advantage, if evolutionary
success is measured simply in terms of quantity.
In addition to exponentially increasing certain animal populations, the
process of domestication has changed the very nature of its subjects.
Archaeological evidence suggests that the early stages of domestication produced
similar changes in a variety of species: reduced body size in general and brain
size in particular, increased diversity in superficial characteristics like ear shape
and coat color, and shortening of the face (part of a set of skeletal and behavioral
changes that can be explained as the retention of juvenile characteristics into
adulthood).30 It is likely that people originally selected animals for tractability
and for distinctiveness-characteristics that would make it easier to manage the
creatures and to tell them apart. Once domesticated populations were firmly
distinguished from their wild relatives, however, people probably began to breed
for more specialized qualities. Modern breeders often claim that their favorite
ANIMAL PLANET I 215
variety of dog or horse or cow has ancient roots, but although it is clear that
distinct strains existed in earlier times, it is difficult to make direct connections
from them to particular modern types. (Of course every living animal has ancient
forebears, just as every living human does; in both cases the problem is to figure
out who they might be.) Over the past three centuries animal breeding has become
a highly technical, self-conscious, and institutionalized process-a form of
bioengineering before the fact. By the middle of the nineteenth century, breeding
(or artificial selection) had become so widely understood, that Charles Darwin
used it to introduce his audience to the less familiar process of natural selection
in the opening pages of On the Origin of Species.31
When modern breeding practices were taking form in the eighteenth century
or a little before, the aim of breeders was to enhance quality in ways that could be
assessed quantitatively. The first kinds of animals for which elaborate public
breeding records were kept-the kind that could sustain pedigrees-were the
thoroughbred horse and the greyhound, both bred for speed, which could be easily
measured. The first livestock breed to receive this kind of formal attention was
the shorthorn cow, the subject of a herd book published in i822. But careful
breeding had been going on long before, validated by market prices if not by paper
trails. On the contrary, the best-known stockbreeder of the eighteenth century,
Robert Bakewell, made a point of obscuring the descent of his prized bulls, rams,
boars, and stallions. The quality of his animals was a matter of judgment,
guaranteed by his name rather than those of his animals. His own success was
calibrated by the size of the stud fees. Although Bakewell often has been credited
with developing the breeding techniques that he applied and marketed so
brilliantly, it is likely that his fame obscured the earlier labors of modest breeders,
whose unsung achievements served as the basis for his celebrated ones.32
By the nineteenth century, as pet keeping became a popular pastime among
members of the middling and less-than-middling orders of western societies, the
infrastructure of breeding was applied to dogs, cats, rabbits, rodents, and various
kinds of birds. It often had been difficult to decide what made a cow or pig
excellent-there were heated controversies over, for example, whether morbid
obesity was a prime desideratum or the reverse. With animals whose major
function was to provide companionship and amusement, however, such decisions
could approach the impossible. Or at least, they were likely to be very arbitrary,
often reflecting an appreciation simply of the human power to manipulate.
Sometimes this power was exercised to the obvious disadvantage of established
useful traits, and sometimes it was exercised capriciously enough to produce
creatures that were perceived as monstrosities. For example, when collies became
popular pets in the Victorian period, they lost many of the characteristics that
made them effective herd dogs. Particularly lamented was their intelligence,
which was sacrificed when their skulls were reshaped to feature a long elegant
nose. As information about genetics filtered into the pet-fancying world during
the twentieth century, breeders' techniques became more focused and powerful.
They even were able to achieve some goals that had long eluded them, such as a
canary colored red rather than yellow.33
The shift from breeding livestock to breeding pets was also ordinarily,
although not inevitably, a shift from the country to the city. Animals are most
frequently associated with rural settings, but cities always have been full of them.
Before the development of modern technologies of refrigeration and
transportation, towns needed to accommodate both dairies and abattoirs. 34 Dairy
animals mostly stayed out of sight, while livestock bound for slaughter often
marched through the streets, but both groups added significantly to the urban
waste stream. Many people, including those living in tenements, kept their own
chickens and even pigs. Before the twentieth century, all urban thoroughfares
were choked with horses, which disappeared only gradually with the advent of
the internal combustion engine. To some extent, at least in the affluent cities of
the industrial world, these utilitarian animals have been replaced by burgeoning
pet populations. Several zoonotic diseases typically have occurred in urban
settings. Rabies is most frequently transmitted to people by dogs, and so is most
feared where dog populations are densest, although rural dogs and various wild
animals are also carriers. The black death of the middle ages and the early modern
period, whether or not it was the same as the modern contagion called bubonic
plague, was focused on cities, although its traditional association with rats and
fleas recently has been questioned.35 But whether or not they spread the great
fourteenth-century plague, rats of several species would figure prominently in
an animal census of most urban environments, along with other creatures
similarly adapted to scavenging or parasitism (which is to say, semi-tame, if not
semi-domesticated), including mice, pigeons, and stray dogs and cats. Also making
their homes in cities are many animals ordinarily categorized as wild-monkeys
in Calcutta, foxes in London, raccoons and coyotes in Boston.
Of course, it is as difficult to decide what makes an animal wild as to define
wildness or wilderness in any other context. The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto
once introduced its display of stuffed specimens with a diorama featuring a pair
of large raccoons vigorously toppling a garbage can. The diorama (now gone,
unfortunately) evoked a set of incongruities or paradoxes-not only which animals
are wild and which are not, but which are suitable subjects for scrutiny in cultural
and educational settings. Thus most past and present zoos have preferred to
collect exotic wild animals, segregating any resident domesticates into petting
zoos for children; one of the things that distinguishes the Walter Rothschild
Zoological Museum at Tring (now a branch of the Natural History Museum in
London) is its large collection of stuffed dogs. And animals, especially
domesticated ones, breach other boundaries as well. Or, to put it another way,
they help expose some of the assumptions that underlie the stories that we tell,
in particular stories about the extent to which we are part of or separate from
our environmental subject. With animals the question of us and them is always
close to the surface. Not only have they often functioned-even the most
ingratiating of them-as representatives of the natural world, but they often have
been selected as obvious representatives of human groups, whether as totems or
national emblems or team mascots.36
ANIMAL PLANET 217
This liminality is most obvious-and most problematic- with regard to the

animals who resemble us most closely. From its Enlightenment beginnings,
formal taxonomy has recognized not only the general correspondence between
people and what were then known as quadrupeds (that is, mammals), but also the
particular similarities that human beings shared with apes and monkeys. It was
the non-functional details that proved most compelling: the shape of the external
ear, for example, or the flatness of fingernails and toenails. On this basis, the
celebrated eighteenth-century systematizer Carolus Linnaeus located people
firmly within the animal kingdom: He constructed the primate order to
accommodate humans, apes, monkeys, prosimians, and bats.37 Humans also were
claimed to demonstrate their animal affinities in ways that were less abstract
and more sensational. In an age fascinated by hybrids, humans were sometimes
alleged to be the objects or the originators of potentially fruitful relationships
with orangutans and chimpanzees, although scientific accounts of such episodes
tended to be carefully distanced by skepticism or censure.38 Outside the
community of experts, claims could be less restrained; in the nineteenth century
non-Europeans who were unusually hairy or adept with their toes were ballyhooed
as products of an ape-human cross. Physical and mental similarities between
people and other primates often were foregrounded in zoo displays that featured
chimpanzees who not only wore clothes, but ate with silverware, drank from cups,
and turned the pages of books.
Such displays were not universally appealing, however, and as evolutionary
theory suggested a more concrete and ineluctable connection, it provoked
increasingly articulate resistance. As Darwin sadly noted at the end of The Descent
of Man, written a decade after the appearance of the Origin in 1859, "The main
conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-
organized form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons."39
In the century and more since Darwin wrote, his evolutionary theory has been
enshrined as biological orthodoxy. But some of the questions that troubled his
Victorian critics continue to complicate modern narratives, whether told for a
scientific or scholarly audience or for a less specialized one. Remote from the
reflections of historians, animals clog the airwaves. A majority of the
extravagantly produced commercials for Superbowl XXXVIII featured animal
actors, although this was not their most frequently remarked attribute. An entire
cable channel is devoted to animals, and zoological documentaries appear
frequently on other networks. Many of these programs present an environmental
context and an elegiac environmentalist message, at the same time that they
celebrate the physical triumph of fit, canny trappers or photographers (hunters
transformed to suit modern sensibilities) over dangerous beasts. It is often hard
to know who is the hero of the story, let alone what the moral is meant to be.
Harriet Ritvo is ArthurJ. Conner Professor of History at MIT. She is the author
of The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age and
The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying
Imagination. She currentlyis workingon a book about the Victorian environment.
NOTES
1. I will continue to assume that we are animals too, but for the sake of euphony, I will
refer to nonhuman animals just as "animals" for the rest of this essay.
2. The literature on animal rights and responsibilities is relatively sparse and eccentric:
See, for example, E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishiment of
Animals: The Lost History of Europe's Animal Trials (1906; reprint, London: Faber,
1987); and Vicki Hearne, Bandit: Dossierof a Dangerous Dog(NewYork: HarperCollins,
1991). The literature on vivisection is denser and more conventional: See, for example,
Nicolaas A. Rupke, ed., Vivisection in Historical Perspective (London: Routledge, 1987);
and Richard D. French, Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
3. Susan D. Jones, ValuingAnimals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). For further reflections on this topic
see Harriet Ritvo, "History and Animal Studies," Society and Animals 10 (2002): 403-
6. This issue of Society and Animals also includes essays on the relation of animal
studies to other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.
4. Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1986), ch. 11.
5. See, for example, C. K. Brain, The Hunters or the Hunted?An Introduction to African
Cave Taphonomy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
6. Edward 0. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992),
ch. 12.
7. Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W.W. Norton,
1999), ch. 1.
8. Discussions of the evidence for alternative points of view can be found in E. C. Pielou,
After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991), ch. 12; and Tim Flannery, The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological
History of North America and Its Peoples (New York: Grove Press, 2001), chs. 14-17.
9. Claudine Cohen, The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History, trans. William
Rodarmor (1994; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), especially chapter 12.
See also A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the
Discovery of Human Prehistory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
10. Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
il. For statistical analysis of the consequences of the fur trade, see Arthur Radclyffe
Dugmore, The Romance of the Beaver; being the History of the Beaver in the Western
Hemisphere (London: William Heinemann, 1914), ch. 4; and Briton Cooper Busch, The
War against the Seals: A History of the North American Seal Fishery (Kingston and
Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1985).
12. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian
Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), chs. 5-6.
13. For an elaborate account of the decimation and partial recovery of the North American
bison herd, see Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
14. John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British
Imperialism (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1988); and Richard Fitter
and Peter Scott, The Penitent Butchers: 75 Years of Wildlife Conservation: The Fauna
Preservation Society 1903-1978 (London: Fauna Preservation Society, 1978).
ANIMAL PLANET I 219
15. For an extensive discussion of this campaign in the United States and Britain, see
Robin W. Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation: A Study in Nature
Protection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
16. Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden
History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001);
and Louis S. Warren, The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-
CenturyAmerica (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
17. Robert Paddle, The History and Extinction of the Thylacine (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000).
i8. Peter Boomgaard broaches the possibility of writing history, environmental or
otherwise, that incorporates the perspective of animals, but regretfully decides to keep
to the conventional path. Both his decision and his regret are understandable. Peter
Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World 1600-1950 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
19. Jim Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993).
2o. Dale Peterson, EatingApes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
21. Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger, Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine
Origin, Behavior, and Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). For an
alternative view, see Juliet Clutton-Brock, A NaturalHistory of DomesticatedMammals
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), ch. 3.
22. For example, William McNeill and John R. McNeill, The Human Web:A Bird's-Eye View
of World History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological
Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, goo-1goo (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986); and Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of
Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).
23. For overviews of the relation between humans and other animals as mediated by
disease, see Lise Wilkinson, Animals and Disease: An Introduction to the History of
Comparative Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Joanna
Swabe, Animals, Disease and Human Society: Human-Animal Relations and the Rise
of Veterinary Medicine (London: Routledge, 1999).
24. Classically, in William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor, 1976).
25. The process that began in 1492 or thereabouts arguably continued until the flu
pandemic of 1918. For description of that event, see Alfred W. Crosby, America's
Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza or 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990); and Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 198 and
the Search for the Virus that Caused It (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999).
26. David S. Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian
Mortality since i6oo (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), chs. 1-2. For the
standard explanation, see Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and
Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1973; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003). While
the fact of population decline is uncontested, the extent of the demographic disaster
is highly controversial, on historical, scientific, and political grounds, as Krech
explains in Ecological Indian, ch 3.
27. Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest
of Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
28. For a scientific discussion of BSE, see Pierre-Marie Lledo, Histoire de la vache folle
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001).
29. For an account of BSE in Britain, see Harriet Ritvo, "Mad Cow Mysteries," American
Scholar (Spring 1998): 113-22.
30. Clutton-Brock, Natural History of Domesticated Mammals, ch. 1.
220 0 ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 9 (APRIL 2004)
31. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859; reprin

Press, 1964), ch. i. Darwin later wrote a very long book dealing exclusively with this
subject: The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, 2 vols. (1868;
reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
32. For accounts of early breeding, see Nicholas Russell, Like Engend'ring Like: Heredity
and Animal Breeding in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986); Harriet Ritvo, "Possessing Mother Nature: Genetic Capital in i8th-
Century Britain," in EarlyModern Conceptions of Property, ed. Susan Staves and John
Brewer (London: Routledge, 1994), 413-26; and Ritvo, Animal Estate, ch. 2.
33. Modern breeding efforts are discussed in Margaret E. Derry, Bred for Perfection:
Shorthorn Cattle, Collies, and Arabian Horses since i8oo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2003); and Tim Birkhead, A Brand-New Bird: How Two Amateur
Scientists Created the First Genetically Engineered Animal (New York: Basic Books,
2003).
34. On the development of modern abbatoirs, see Noelie Vialles, Animal to Edible, trans. J.
A. Underwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
35. See David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1997), introduction and ch. 1.
36. Keith Thomas has discussed the development of the association between animals and
nature in Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York:
Pantheon, 1983), especially in chs. 3, 4, and 6.
37. Carolus Linnaeus, Systema Naturae: Regnum Animale (1758; reprint, London: British
Museum [Natural History], 1956).
38. For an extended discussion of eighteenth and nineteenth century hybrids and cross-
breeds, see Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the
Classifying Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), ch. 3.
39. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 1950),
919.

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Animal Planet

Author(s): Harriet Ritvo

The dodo, one of the earliest acknowledged extinctions.

the history of science, most conspicuously in relation to the development of

Figure 2. Wild Boar.

harmonious or static relation to the rest of the environment-literally or

A a . . ..:.... ... .. 2. '. _

Samuel W. Baker, Wild Beasts a

troublesomely inconsistent as evolution proved to be). As formerly blank spaces

The thylacine was lamented only after it was late.

the tiger in Indonesia and Malaysia depended on the opinions of a variety of

to be domesticated to transmit zoonotic disease, although when wild animals

Figure 6. New Leicester Sheep.

Thomas Bewick, A General History of Quadrupeds (Newcastle: T. Bewick, 1824), 63.

European biological assemblage, which had proved so effective in expediting the

This liminality is most obvious-and most problematic- with regard to the

31. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859; reprin

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