S9E2: Modernity with Erica Hill and Susan Nance

Erica Hill and Susan Nance join Claudia on the show to discuss “modernity.” They discuss what this relatively messy shorthand means for history and for understanding human–animal relations. They try to unpack what is meant by modernity and touch on everything from industrialisation to concealment and consumption.  

Topics Covered:

•  Animal History, the journal that tries to understand animals as historical subjects
•  Using animal welfare science to interpret historical animals’ behaviour
• Zooarchaeology, domestication, and deep-time shifts that complicate ideas of modernity
•  Concealment and the contradictions of animal use
•  Intensification and standardisation
•  Celebrity animals and hidden populations 
•  Animal Highlight: Bears in Kingston, Ontario

Date Recorded: 27 April 2026

Erica Hill is President's Arctic Professor at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, Alaska. She is an archaeologist with broad research interests in how humans and animals lived together in the past. She has published extensively on Indigenous human engagement with marine mammals in the North Pacific and has worked in Iceland, Peru, and the US Southwest. Her most recent edited volume is Reimagining Human–Animal Relations in the Circumpolar North (2024) with Peter Whitridge. 

Susan Nance is Professor of History and affiliated faculty with the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. She is the author of various books and articles, including Rodeo: An Animal History (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and Animals in Nineteenth Century America: A History in Documents (Broadview Press, 2026). Susan is also Co-Lead Editor at Animal History, the first scholarly journal dedicated to the histories of animal life and human-animal relationships. Her current research documents the nature and scope of the trade in biologically-wild animals in the 20th century United States through a study of Las Vegas. https://susannance.com/ 

Featured: 

• Animal History
• Rodeo: An Animal History by Susan Nance
• The Historical Animal by Susan Nance
• Reimagining Human-Animal Relations in the Circumpolar North edited by Peter Whitridge and Erica Hill
• Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development by Jennifer Robinson 
• What Is Animal Prehistory? by Shumon T. Hussain
• Man and the Natural World by Kieth Thomas
• Hundreds trying to storm Wisconsin beagle research facility on the CNN

The Animal Turn is part of the  iROAR, an Animals Podcasting Network and can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, LinkedIn,Blue Sky, and Instagram

Credits:

• Sponsor: Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E)
• Guests: Susan Nance and Erica Hill
• Host: Claudia Hirtenfelder
• Editing and Production: Claudia Hirtenfelder
• Episode Artwork: Rebecca Shen
• Content Creation and Support: Herre de Bondt and Carlo Salzani
• Technical Support: Christiaan Mentz
• Animal Highlight: Stones Walking Tour
• Sound Effects: BBC Sound Effects; Epidemic Sound
• Bed Music: Gordon Clarke
• Logo: Jeremy John

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

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Celebrity Animals And Hidden Costs

Siobhan O'Sullivan 0:00

This is another iROAR podcast.

Susan Nance 0:05

The herds that Jumbo came from in the Sudan were hunted out of existence while he was traveling around the world as a famous individual. Another example of this that comes along a little bit later is there's a number of dogs that played Lassie. Uh, the, you know, the TV and film character Lassie and novel, novelized character Lassie. So this is also a kind of a uh a function of the sort of modern consumer attitude that wants to focus on certain sort of celebrated or special animals. Lassie became very famous as a character played by a number of dogs. A lot of people thought it was the same dog the whole time. But the character actually consumed a number of individual dogs who played uh Lassie.

Season Setup And Guests Introduced

Claudia Hirtenfelder 0:59

Welcome back to the Animal Turn, everyone. This is season nine, where we're looking at animals and history. It's a season that's been long in the works, and I'm very excited to see it finally coming to and hitting the airwaves. In episode two, we're gonna be talking about a really important concept, and that is modernity. A lot of folks who like to write about history like to sit in the modern period. But what exactly is modernity? So we're gonna try and think through the concept a bit today, as well as what its significance is for animals. Two guests joined me on the show today. One is an animal historian and the other is an archaeologist. And I'm pretty excited because I've never had an archaeologist on the show. And I do know that the season is overrepresented with animal historians. I think understandably so. Uh, but this kind of raised some flags for me that there's some spaces to think about the different ways in which animals' pasts come to the fore. Let me tell you a bit about the guests uh on today's episode. The first is Erica Hill, who is the president's Arctic professor at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, Alaska. She is an archaeologist with broad research interests in how humans and animals live together in the past. She has published extensively on indigenous human engagement with marine mammals in the North Pacific and has worked in Iceland, Peru, and the US Southwest. Her most recent edited volume is Reimagining Human-animal relations in the Circumpolar North, which she wrote together with Peter Whitridge. The other guest today is Susanz, who is a professor of history and affiliated faculty at the Campbell Center for Study of Animal Welfare at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. She is the author of various books and articles related to animals. This includes a book, Rodeo and Animal History, as well as another called Animals in Nineteenth Century America: A History of Documents. Susan is also the co-lead of Animal History, a journal we speak about a fair bit in today's episode. If you're interested in questions and understandings and thoughts of animals and history, definitely go and check out this journal. Susan's current research documents the nature and scope of the trade in biologically wild animals in the 20th century US through the study of Las Vegas, which we talk a little bit about towards the end of the show. Just a call to action. If you have a spot of time, please, please, please share the show, rate it, review it, do all of those lovely and fantastic things. I know it takes a spot of time and it's easy to forget. Trust me, I listen to podcasts and I forget it all the time. So I get it. But if you have a spot of time, I would really appreciate it. All of these reviews go a long way in terms of getting people to find the show. And the more people that are listening about and thinking about animals, uh the better. And if you want to support the show in other ways, you can also buy me a coffee. There's a support button on the Buzz Sprite website. There's tons of ways to support the show if you want to. But that's enough waffling from me for now. Enjoy the episode. And remember, towards the end, there'll be an animal highlight where I'm giving some historical bits about animals from Kingston. Okay, enjoy.

Why Create The Animal History Journal

Claudia Hirtenfelder 4:10

Hi, Eric and Susan. Welcome to the Animal Tone Podcast, uh, where we're doing a season focused on animals and history. And I'm delighted to have you both here because you are, of course, editors of the relatively recently launched journal Animal History. Uh, well titled for this uh season. So I'm very happy to have you on the show. And of course, you've both worked in uh the realm of animal history in different ways. Uh today we're going to be talking a bit about modernity uh as a concept, an idea, but I'm also hoping to learn a bit about uh your work and the journal in general. So let's start there. Could both of you tell me a little bit about you uh and how you came to be interested in animal studies, animal history, uh, and perhaps some insights into the journal. What is animal history as a journal?

Susan Nance 5:03

I'm Susan Nance. Uh, I'm a historian of the United States and also I uh animals, uh, and I uh tend to bring those together in that I uh study the entertainment business and uh especially live entertainment. I study many things though. I'm one of those people who's interested in all the things, and so uh my research has sort of uh gone all over the place. Uh I think in terms of animals, people know me for a book I published about uh the management of elephants in 19th century American circuses and uh about what elephants did to circuses and what circuses did to elephants and people. And um since then I published a book on uh the animals in rodeo uh as a sport, and that was mostly a 20th century story. And um I've uh published various other things. Anyways, my main uh goal in all of it has been to try to figure out how we can write about animals as historically contingent beings. Um, and when I started out, people weren't doing that. Animals were kind of a background noise in human stories, and they didn't have any sort of agency or power to shape the past. People studied animals the way that they studied water or the weather or hurricanes. Uh, they were sort of these unthinking occasional forces, but but mostly history was about human agency, right? So, anyways, I just tried to find ways that we can use the findings of people who study contemporary animals to understand how they perceive the world and how they act in the world, and use those to as tools, those findings as tools to interpret historical sources. So, I'm bringing together animal welfare research science and uh human-animal studies, so sort of sociological, anthropological studies of people and animals together, and use those to interpret the historical documents. In any event, I've done that for a while. So, animal uh history is a journal, I hope, will cultivate more of that kind of work, and it is, uh, to give people a place to sort of have a journal of record for people who are interested in that kind of work. And uh, because there's been quite a bit of it being published, but it was scattered all over the place in different journals, and so we thought it would be a good idea to have it all come together in one spot. We won't catch everything. We don't publish all the articles, we we though we'd like to. Um, but uh uh we're on to uh issue uh um sorry, volume two, issue number two is going to be coming out pretty quick, I think.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 7:57

It was launched last year, right? In 2025.

Susan Nance 8:00

Yeah, that's right.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 8:01

The first uh the inaugural edition. And um, you said there that you're interested in how you use contemporary scientific knowledge to, I guess, interpret. I guess that's you, Susan, not necessarily the journal. The journal is a whole host of animal history uh methodologies and foci, but you, Susan, are also interested in how contemporary scientific knowledge can be used to understand uh historical animals. How do you how do you do that? Could you could you tell me a little bit more?

Reading Elephants Through Welfare Science

Susan Nance 8:29

Uh one example that I find really useful is uh that when I was working on the book I wrote about elephants, the field of animal welfare science, which is um the study of uh the needs of animals, I'm really simplifying this. The scientists I know would be very disappointed in me. Essentially studying what do animals need and trusting uh them to know what they need. So a lot of that research involves studying people and animals together in settings and trying to understand how the setting that people have created is uh creating certain kinds of behaviors or responses in the animals that the people may not realize they're creating they're creating. So uh I found at the time there was some research that had been done relatively recently uh when I was working in the mid-2000s to late 2000s about the effect of chaining elephants on their behavior. So people had gone to a setting where there were elephants who had been chained up, uh, which is a really old, old way of uh cheap way of confining elephants that had been used in the 19th century a lot. And they found that elephants that are chained up tend to weave. It's called a stereotypic behavior where the elephants will weave back and forth. And uh when you take the chains off, the weaving stops. This was a very basic finding that they had. Well, when I looked at the 19th century accounts of how elephants behaved in the circuses, person after person after person said that they saw the elephants weaving, and that many people at the time thought that that was a natural behavior of elephants. They just weave all the time. That's just how they are. Because people had never seen elephants in the wild themselves, especially in the US, obviously. There was the odd person, but not many. And um, this seemed just like a really very good example of how people took this unnatural elephant that they had sort of created or artificial situation they created in an elephant coping with it, uh, as took it for granted. It's just this is the essential nature of elephants, right? So uh I thought that was a just a really simple example, but very useful example where uh you find that the recent findings can be used to interpret the historical sources. There were other situations where I found people in the 19th century saying elephants think this, they do that, they remember this, they, you know, I had a list of often um mental capacities that were enraging to people trying to run a circus because it made everything harder, more complicated. Uh, elephants wouldn't follow directions, they just were always trying to open locks and unattach themselves from restraints and do other things that made running a circus more dangerous and more expensive, more difficult. Um and uh the contemporary research on elephants' cognitive abilities matched what people were talking about in the 19th century. So it's as though the scientists had sort of quote unquote proven what people who had worked with elephants for a long time uh often, you know, knew in their day-to-day experience of elephants. So, anyways, I thought those were uh just those are just a couple of simple examples of how you can, when you look at people who study contemporary animals and you learn about some of that, it's not perfect information, it's culturally specific too in its own way. But you, when you look back at the historical sources, you'll see everything in three dimensions suddenly. Sources that were kind of black and white or a little bit opaque, or I don't really understand that, you realize, oh, it was just this. Uh, it was very important. And historians aren't trained in that. We're not trained to understand animal behavior. So it's just sort of uh in the same way that environmental historians go and access the environmental science often to understand the environmental past. Uh, I think a lot of animal historians have started to do that too.

Limits Of Using Modern Science

Claudia Hirtenfelder 12:43

Yeah, uh, that's a really uh important point. And I guess it's also oh let me ask like, do you find it challenging at all? Does it raise any problems depending on where that contemporary knowledge is uh generated or the intent that that contemporary knowledge comes with? So, what I'm thinking of here are agricultural sciences, for example. So let's say someone who's doing a history on pigs and cows and chickens, for example, a lot of the information and contemporary knowledge that we know about those animals is shaped by um, you know, a lens of kind of efficiency and how to get the most out of the animal, how to ensure that they uh go to their deaths uh in a way that is not um that they don't resist in effect. Do you have to kind of be mindful, I guess, when using contemporary knowledge like that and interpreting historical animals who wouldn't have been kept in factory farms, for example, in the ways pigs and chickens are today?

Susan Nance 13:43

Yes, yeah. Yeah, and people who study agricultural animals have, yeah, their own set of uh problems in figuring out, well, what is this animal, anyways, right? What I was studying wild caught elephants, they haven't changed biologically, humans aren't controlling their reproduction. If you you know, if one is studying bulldogs, you know, just in the last century, these dogs have been transformed radically. Um, so you can't use contemporary veterinary science on the specific problems of today's purebred bulldogs to understand the bulldogs that lived a hundred years ago because they had very different bodies uh and physi and better health and different kinds of, you know, uh they're just it's just a different being. So yeah, you have to definitely uh in my case, some of the people people who were doing the research on the elephants worked at my university. So I was able to go and talk to them. And uh I was able to understand how they uh devised their research sort of programs, the questions they were asking, how they would set up a research uh project to investigate quest whatever questions they were interested in, how they got their findings, the problems with the findings, you know. So I got to really talk to them and understand what we can know and what we can't know. Uh, and so I when I use uh a lot of the animal welfare science research that I use and other contemporary findings, uh, if I'm not sure about something, because often historians can't be sure, I try to push things around with question marks and say it could be that this was the case. Or we find that, you know, today we know this probably. At the time people were also saying this, so it seems that it's you know, and I think just not being trying not to be too heavy-handed about everything. And if people disagree with what I've said, that's good because uh we need more research. So I hope it enrages someone enough that they think, ah, that tears it, I'm gonna go do this myself. And it means there's some energy in the uh in the field. If people are having disagreements about things, that's good. That means there's something at stake.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 16:06

No, that's fantastic. Thanks so much.

Archaeology, Bones, And Animal Lives

Claudia Hirtenfelder 16:08

Um, that was really helpful. And Erica, I know you also do kind of animal histories, but you do a different kind of animal history. So could you tell us a little bit about your story?

Erica Hill 16:17

Yeah, thanks, Claudia. Um, so I'm an archaeologist, uh, and so I have a really different disciplinary background than um than obviously animal historians, uh, although I do work with ethnohistoric documents and um usually 19th century documents of of historians and explorers and what have you. Um, but most of my data comes in the form of material culture. Um, and so this might be um actually animal remains. Um, I'm a zoarchaeologist, so I study uh animal bones and teeth. Um and I also look at material culture representing animals, uh, animal parts in uh in objects and museum collections, which are incredibly diverse. Uh and so um, in addition to the historical documents, the material culture offers us uh really different perspectives on uh animals in the past and human-animal relations in the past.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 17:20

So you so you are trained to kind of actually read animal bodies, animals' bones, teeth. So you you could see so so yeah, I mean we haven't had any archaeologists on, so walk me through how this kind of process would work. What kind of research? You've got a great book called Um Reimagining Human Animal Relations in Circumpolar North. How is that connected to archaeology?

Erica Hill 17:46

Right. So um I've done a lot of work in the Arctic. I've been I'm an Arctic specialist and I work uh in the North Pacific, primarily along the coast of Alaska and adjacent areas of uh the Russian Farry Sochafoka. And archaeologically, all archaeological sites almost exclusively um will have animal remains as part of the archaeological record. And that's primarily animal bones, uh, bones, teeth, horn, uh, tusk, so ivory, uh might be fish scales, fur beaks, all kinds of things. And animal remains in that form constitute a massive amount of the archaeological record at many archaeological sites, almost all of them. And so a subfield of archaeology is called zoo archaeology, or if you're in the UK, archaeozology. And that is the analysis and identification of the animal remains. So people who sit in a lab and look at each and every bone and identify it to species, uh, and then calculate, hey, you know, there's this much walrus at this site. Uh, and then we also have, you know, some cormorants at this site, and there's evidence of uh, you know, uh, even there's an evidence of a gull at this site, and this, what kind of gull is it? That we really try to reconstruct the presence of speci of species at an archaeological site. And that's one line of evidence that zoarchaeologists look at. And traditionally, it's been evidence, it's been interpreted as evidence of subsistence. Well, this is there's a one-to-one relationship between the the animals that we see at the site and what people were eating. And then archaeologists also have this big category of what they just sort of would consider ritual. So animals that that don't don't seem to belong in the subsistence category, but we're not sure what it is. So we're gonna call it, we're gonna call it ritual. And generally archaeologists sort of leave it at that. So we have subsistence, then we have these other sort of odd animals, and we don't know what to do with them. Um, so so that's archaeology in a very simplified nutshell. The other area of of animal uh material culture that I look at uh and that many other archaeologists look at is animal representations and animal parts in um uh in the material culture. So animal, so let me just give you some examples from the North Pacific. Um, so I study walrus, uh, and people would use every part of the walrus. So walrus teeth used for bolas to take birds, uh walrus scapuli, so shoulder bones used to make snow shovels, walrus uh uh ribs uh used as sled runners. And so looking at the artifacts uh made of animal remains is another line of evidence that tells us how humans in the past looked at animals, used animal parts, uh, because it wasn't just for food or consumption.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 20:54

You know, when you find these animal remains or these material cultures, is there interest generally in how humans have used and understood animals, or is there a genre of this that's I suppose gone through the animal turn to some extent and is interested in what this can tell us about animals' histories and cultures and experiences?

Erica Hill 21:14

Yeah, great question. Uh, and traditionally, um, until I would say the last you know, 15, 20 years, it has been exactly what you said. It's how did humans utilize animals? A very utilitarian, very functional, is very subject-object-oriented approach. Um, what did humans do with animals? How did they hunt them? How did they, you know, process them? How did those animals end up in the archaeological record? Um, but more recently, uh a trend has developed called social zoo archaeology that has appreciated that animals have uh more complex meanings in human societies, that they're good to think with. And then even more recently, uh, archaeologists have a Handful of us have started looking at issues of animal agency and personhood, and how animals as subjects and actors have co-produced the archaeological record. And so that animal turn in archaeology is very recent. And that's the type of archaeology that I'm most interested in looking at is humans and animals as co-producers of the archaeological record, co-producers of human-animal niches in the past.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 22:32

That's really, really interesting. So I can see now how animal history as a journal will be a great place for a whole host of different historical questions concerning animals, whether you're thinking about social and political histories, whether you're bringing together contemporary science and historical knowledges, or if you're starting to think actually about material cultures and the ways in which these could tell us about animals' history, which, as both of you have indicated, is a growing field and one where there is a need for much more research and so much to say, right? Think about how many books and libraries are filled with considerations and concerns, thinking about humans' varied geographical, economic, political, social histories, and that's just one species on the planet. So think about the numerous histories that have yet to be told.

Defining Modernity Without Easy Answers

Claudia Hirtenfelder 23:16

Our focus for today is primarily on thinking through the idea of modernity, which is a big concept and a tricky concept, and I think an important one that comes up all the time when thinking about history. So why don't we start with just a basic understanding? What is modernity? Susan, can you help us uh understand this? What is what is modernity? When you hear someone say that, what does it mean?

Susan Nance 23:40

I'm not sure if I can. Okay, well, historians use terms like that as a sort of a shorthand so that we can speak to each other about certain periods and assume even if we argue about what categori or what characterize the particular period, there's certain things that we sort of mostly agree upon. So modernity is one of them. What to be modern means depends on what part of the planet you're on. The early modern Europe is sort of if I'm gonna get this completely wrong because I don't or partly wrong because I don't study Europe, but it's uh the 17th century, 15th, 16th, 17th century, I think. In the United States, modernity is 1890 to 1940, more or less. So completely uh use of the word modern. So uh generally though, modernity is a period of time when one has you find industrialization is going on, urbanization, people applying science and scientific ways of investigating the world to shape industrialization and urbanization, and you find the appearance of electronic media and um more uh people living in larger communities where there's a greater chance of some anonymity. So uh instead of living in little hamlets and villages, and again that happens in different places at different times, um, living in big cities where you might be able to sort of remake yourself as an individual. Capitalism is related to all of this, capitalism really uh drives a lot of these changes and is driven by them. Um, so uh that's a very rough outline of what modernity is.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 25:45

Yeah, I imagine enlightenment is part of the reason why the idea of modernity comes so much earlier in Europe than in the US, because enlightenment kind of brought with it all of these different ideas of you know, secularization, a move away from religious ideas, which also led to the kind of embrace of scientific understandings and classification and all of that kind of stuff. So I wonder if that's part of the reason for why the idea of modernity comes so much earlier in Europe than it does in North America.

Susan Nance 26:19

Could be, could be, as uh someone who studies North America, I'll I'll I'll let you have that. I don't know.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 26:27

We'll leave we'll leave it, I'll follow, I'll follow you and say it be that's I'll leave the question there. Um Erica, maybe you could help us with understanding some of the broader periodization. So, I mean, modernity is one kind of period, but considering your focus on our archaeozoology, um, maybe you could help put us put modernity within a broader kind of time. So when when people concerned with history or the history of animals are talking, uh, what kind of temporal periods could people be talking about? Modernity is just one of them. What are some of the others?

Erica Hill 27:00

Yeah, so you know, listening to Susan talk about some of the characteristics of modernity, and as an archaeologist, I'm thinking in terms of thousands of years, right? And so um archaeologists recognize a big disjuncture. Wow, we're we're we're we're switching how we look at it, but um, animal domestication is looked at. And by some, I think, I think you could even say that, you know, um marks domestication of of plants and animals marks a massive shift in in how we live with animals, um, and our spatial relationships with animals and our perspectives and perceptions of animals and how we represent animals and how we use or exploit animals. And as Susan pointed out, you know, these these changes happen at different times throughout the world. But for archaeologists, around 15,000 years ago in the Near East, we see a radical shift with animals coming into close proximity with humans, living in villages with humans, you know, sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, horses, camels. And, you know, one way of looking at this is that's when that shift towards domestication is what made modernity possible. Bringing animals into controlling, or now we think of it uh increasingly as sort of co-domestication process, that it provided advantages to both humans and animals, but bringing animals into proximity with humans, controlling their breeding, uh, and then obviously benefits to

Domestication As Deep-Time Turning Point

Erica Hill 28:39

animals, feeding animals. And you could look at that as a watershed shift from a hunting and gathering society where humans were basically out hunting and collecting animals, uh, engaging with them in a very different way, to bringing them into the household, bringing them into the village, bringing them into the town. And then you look, if you look at that process that really gets uh amplified and um and does eventually industrialized to where we're at now, this very industrialized, again, more distant relationship with animals, where most of us don't see those animals, don't live with those types of animals in our houses anymore. So the archaeological perspective is is much longer. And although we we you know understand how how historians sort of categorize modernity, I think what many archaeologists would say, well, hey, yeah, there's that, you know, addition of electronic media and industrialization and rationalism, but really you could look at that as beginning, you know, 15,000 years ago, um, in this spatial shift uh and subsistence shift that happened 15,000 years ago in the Near East and different times in the Andes and Central Mexico and Southeast Asia.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 30:01

Okay, so when thinking about animals, we've got these two really big time periods that you can see in terms of animals' histories really matter. That domestication changes human-animal relationships in a pretty substantive way, and modernity changes animal human-animal relations in pretty substantive ways. What are some of the ways that this kind of the bringing on of industrialization, um, modernity, more kind of technology, secular thinking, what did this all mean for human-animal relationships? Uh, any examples or ideas here that can help us understand the significance of these changes for them?

Susan Nance 30:35

Well, uh, the one that I think about the most is uh the fact that uh as people moved into cities and also the consumer economy uh developed uh in the late 19th and into the early 20th or 20th century, most people made a a transition from working and living with animals day to day to relating to animals mostly in their role as a consumer. So not a producer, but as a consumer. And so the animals that people tended to have at hand on the other side of that transition are therapeutic animals, not working animals. So instead of being uh living with and working with livestock, for example, or wild animals that one is out in the, you know, in the countryside hunting or fishing, catching oneself, uh, that work is being done by somebody else. And people are in towns and cities, the animals they haven't had are sort of uh, as I said, therapeutic. So uh pets service now service animals, zoo animals, um, animals that they see in magazines, television film. So they're here to make us feel better. Because when you strip people out of the environment and working with the environment and uh animals to subsist, uh humans seem to still be hardwired to want to have contact with the natural world. And so we've transitioned away from the workhorse, and instead we have uh a boom in household pet keeping where pets have become members of the family.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 32:17

So you think that's to substitute? You don't think that that's just a substantially different kind of relationship? You think that's a substitution for something that humans have lost?

Susan Nance 32:25

A lot of people have argued that yeah, it's a substitute. It is a very different relationship. Um we don't eat our pets. You know, historically, people had a much more uh pragmatic and sort of frank uh sort of understanding of life and death for animals, because often a human survival was dependent on the death of an animal, and people killed their own animals that they ate, and you know, they saw animals being born, right? They had a much more comprehensive uh experience of an animal's life and what other forms of life lived through. Uh, as a consumer, you just get the sort of packaged version, right? All the dirty stuff is kept from you so that you don't have to feel any guilt about what you're consuming. That that's a big shift where people understand on some level that

Consumers, Concealment, And Animal Guilt

Susan Nance 33:21

animals are being consumed by consumer societies, but they feel bad about it. And so if we focus on celebrity animals or the the zoo, the zoo babies that make us feel good inside for a while, or we focus on the animal that we see on television uh on the Animal Planet show that's you know sort of sets them up in a story where there's a beginning, a middle, and an end, and then it happily resolves at the end. Um, you know, it's it's uh easy to look easier to look away from the sort of degree to which we can just consume bodies, raw numbers of bodies. And it's not uh a uniform system of keeping people sort of with the blinders on. Occasionally, often, often, there's people who uh dissent from this. I was thinking about just uh a few days ago, there were large-scale protests in Wisconsin at uh a research facility that breeds beagles as experimental tools. Um, and there's been uh groups challenging this and challenging the use of dogs in research. A lot of sort of quote unquote animal model research. And this has been going on for a few years now, where and there's been, again, people have objected to this for years, but uh it seems like there's now starting to be some government support for phasing out some of the required work that uses beagles. And you know, people really uh the I thought the protests, you know, people had signs showing pictures of the beagles who are pets. People love beagles often, right? But they're also experimental tools. So there's this contradiction. And of course, the facility was locked, and there were fences, and then the police showed up, and there was tear gas, and so people got arrested, and you know, so I thought it was uh very uh obvious, just really um interesting confrontation that shows this idea of the concealment the animals we're consuming that we sort of rely on that aren't therapeutic for us in some ways are being hidden away behind the walls or the fencing uh at this facility in these buildings with no windows, right? And the people who are confronting that contradiction, there's beagles on the outside that live as members of people's families. Like we need to address this contradiction by ending the Beagle research. Um, that's sort of where this ends up, you know.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 35:52

Yeah, so modernity kind of shows us it's not only changes in technology and intensification, it's also changes in attitude and changes in like practices of concealment. That's really helpful. Yeah, Erica, you said you you had a follow-up.

Erica Hill 36:08

Yeah, I think Susan's um examples and your follow-up actually really highlight the role of space and spatial relationships um in understanding some of these historical trends, right? You know, talking about concealment and fences and proximity. And I really have been influenced by some of the historical animal geography literature out there and talking about how geographies of proximity and intimacy, like Susan mentioned in terms of, you know, living with companion animals, living with therapy animals, living with service animals versus, you know, seeing a disembodied animal neatly packaged in a, you know, in styrofoam at the at the grocery store, right? And how that distances us from animals. And I find the the looking at animals from uh and analyzing animal, human animal relationships from a spatial perspective can be really incredibly informative. And historical animal geography sort of you know helps us look at look at that and conceptualize that uh and and and those shifts, right? He there, these are beagles in this category of in the house, you know, living, sleeping with you in the bed. And these are these other beagles behind this wall. And and that, you know, that category shifts them conceptually into something very, very different, just based on space, right? It's the same type of, it's the same animal, right? But their spatial relationship is so different, it conceptually and epistemologically puts them in a in a different, a different category.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 37:52

I think important here though is the idea of, I mean, yes, there's the same breed of animal, right? But actually, socially speaking, they are not uh in any way. They're obviously different individuals entangled in these different systems, the pet, the pet beagle, uh John at home, and the lab beagle, lab 321, who's named, you know, they they live in fundamentally different systems, which means they're given very different opportunities, very different ways to live, uh, different ways to be be, really. Um, and and that's significant and substantial. And it means that they don't exist outside of these systems, that their lives are greatly shaped by the modern structures that they're caught up in. But I think also something I wanted to pick up on that you said there, Erica, is this idea of distancing us from animals. I've always found it quite curious, right? So I agree, I think um urban animal geographies have done a lot to help us kind of think about animals in substantial ways. And I think space offers us a useful mechanism to do that. But the idea of us being distanced from animals, I think is also something of a misnomer because physically we haven't been really distanced from them. It just depends on the animal we've been distanced from and the nature of those relationships. So many um I feel like it's more of an imaginative distancing than it is a physical distancing. Do you know what I mean? Like, or or is that maybe an unfair thing to say?

Erica Hill 39:20

I think it, I think it can be, I think it depends, as you pointed out, on the animal, right? Like I'm thinking about these massive hog farms in Iowa, right? Where you know, so much of our port comes from these massive industrialized hog farms. And unless you go to certain parts, certain states in the United States or Canada, you don't see it. You don't see it. I never need to see or even think about a pig being being in pain or being industrialized, industrially farmed. But I I get my pig in the grocery, right? There's no there, I just go and there it is. It's neatly packaged. I never need to think about that. Um, but certainly, you know, we can go to places we can't, but it's it almost takes an effort. If you're living in a modern urbanized society, you have to go to the zoo or go to you know, nature, um, or go to a national park to go see a bear or go see a koala or go see a pig. I don't even know where I would go to see a pig if I wanted to go see a pig, right?

Space Changes What Animals Mean

Erica Hill 40:28

Um in in my city.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 40:29

But I think that that's that's interesting because I think were bears, for example, perhaps in some cities historically would have been quite close to the city. You would have had quite a few encounters with bears. In other cities, they would have been completely absent and far removed, right? Except for the menagerie and the zoos that were bringing them in. So there is this kind of interplay between distancing and bringing in that happens, I think, in very temporally specific ways, right?

Susan Nance 40:57

So um But that's that's really good to think about because all of the things that we're talking about here today, animals defy this often. Every day, animals defy this because they don't know about any of it, they don't care. And uh, I think the wildlife comebacks are a really wonderful example of this. How uh in North America, anyways, I'm sure you can find it in other parts of the world, different time periods. There was in the 19th century uh colonization, you know, people spreading out across the continent, settlers from Europe, especially, but also Asia, and there was this massive process of deforestation and sort of taking forests and turning them into uh land that could be used to farm commodities or settlements, you know, people doing homesteading. In the 20th century, a lot of that land got turned into suburbs around cities and people planted trees. When the forests came back, the wild animals came back too. So people found deer and bears and Canada geese and all sorts of animals repurposing these spaces in ways that folks are not always comfortable with because the geese poop on the lawn and the deer eat the rose bushes, and I don't like these coyotes around because I have a dog that weighs nine pounds, and right, so uh, and then you get conflict because the wild animals uh can't some species, not all species, but some are very adaptable and they like the spaces we create for ourselves. Uh so it's um it's important that we don't when we're looking at this process of modernity and animals and human-animal relationships, we don't necessarily see it as a declension narrative. For many species, it was. The passenger pigeon is completely gone. It was hunted to extinction for people wanting to eat the birds or save the feathers to use in the millinery trade or whatever it was. Um for other species like Canada geese, uh modernity's been pretty good for them. You know, their numbers have gone up, right? So always uh looking for sort of the the examples that uh challenge any large sort of arc of story arc we're trying to create is a is a good idea.

Erica Hill 43:21

Yeah, I love this. Um I've seen this as sort of uh considering animal liminal animals or lim animals that are sort of in the yeah, another word is marginal, but I don't know that you know marginal or animals out of place. I mean, in one sense, they really are. I mean, this is their place, right? There's was their place before humans got here, but in the other sense, they're they're in these liminal spaces. And I I think of these as, you know, the foxes, the red foxes that run through my neighborhood that are doing really well, right? Um, or the coyotes in uh my, you know, a family in my family, uh family's home in Florida where they run through the, you know, the neighborhood. And um, but it's really interesting to see human responses to this. And I think those human responses really highlight some of those tensions in those animals, right? I've heard people describe the coyotes as, well, they, they're wolves, right? They don't under, they don't know they're they're they're coyotes. They they they're wolves, they're threatening, they're, you know, they're wild, they're they're dangerous. You know, uh I work in Alaska and moose are uh pretty commonly show up in in some parts of town, bears in other parts of town. And you know how communities and individuals respond to these animals really tells us an enormous amount about um broader conceptions of human-animal relations and destabilizes because it destabilizes these very neat distinctions between you know house companion animals and quote unquote wild animals.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 44:59

Yeah and I think I mean this this speaks to your point that you said earlier about geography being helpful. And I think that this you know it it says that these are empirical questions, right? So so you know we to understand the implications of modernity on specific animals you need to focus on specific animals in specific places and and how you know what it meant for moose where you are versus moose in another city in another part of of North America could be vastly different. So this means the implications and the ramifications of modern processes have been unevenly distributed amongst animals and that it's not it's not easy enough to just say oh this is what it's been for dogs, this is what it's been for I think that's what we've seen throughout these examples here whether we're speaking about beagles beagles or bears you're seeing that to really fully appreciate the implications of modernity you have to do the it's an empirical question. It's a question that requires focused attention um and yeah and you and to your point there about how people respond I think that just again says to me that when we're talking about modernity we're also talking about shifts in ideas. So it's not just that we're talking about cities I don't want I don't want people to necessarily walk away here thinking modernity equals cities. It's a shift in idea as well.

Erica Hill 46:21

Yeah a follow just a I think a really enlightening example is bears. Bears in June Alaska uh where I work we everybody

Wildlife Comebacks And Urban Conflict

Erica Hill 46:30

has bear cans right so trash cans we have really strict rules about when to put the cans out trash can you don't have like regular trash cans you have these ones where you have to stick your hand in and open it you know and they're bear proof right and that's how we've structured the community is you you don't do things to attract bears. It's yours it's part of your responsibility of living in bear country. But there are other especially in the lower 48 where bears are nuisance animals right and and humans should be able to put their trash out and treat their trash however they want and bears are the problem. And so that just highlights your point that you know these species have very different patterns of engagement and humans have different attitudes toward these animals in in different even in the United States right there's multiple different ways.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 47:16

In another community you can imagine where a bear might be an anomaly people are excited they run outside their houses and take pictures of the bear coming through right um so and then you've got cities like Churchill right that are actively mobilizing and using the idea that they are the most you know most polar bears in the world come so they're actually mobilizing that as a means of getting tourists to come in even though this is actually the result of a really problematic the the influx of polar bears into Churchill is a is a result of a whole bunch of challenging relationships around waste but also indicators of climate change and and and options available to polar bees really great example yeah oh I agree rats and lice and um mice we can think of and you know think of various other living things that um I don't know a modern they would have their own history of modernity as well um that is tied to what happens to us happens to them and vice versa.

Susan Nance 48:25

Yeah and and so there are more of those liminal animals that Erica was mentioning that are always with us. There's no part of human history where those creatures aren't with us.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 48:36

And and I think this is why I I had that initial reaction to the idea of distancing because I do think there is a distancing mechanism.

Susan Nance 48:42

I think it's a governance response or of sorts where we're trying to distance certain animals from us wherever the us here is um people have tried to distance the lice and the rats and the mice and it doesn't work unsuccessfully and with a great amount it's hard.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 48:58

It's very difficult and involves a great amount of violence it's um yeah I wonder if you guys would sit with me for a minute about just thinking about these um ideas and imaginaries that sit with modernity right so cruelty seems to be one that comes up the idea of cruelty seems to be a modern idea right so that you can be cruel. Sanitization the idea of sanitized environments seems to be another one that both of which have very very big implications for animals. Can you think of others uh you know these the ideas uh of what it means to be modern and how they've implicated or impacted animals. The idea of a pet animal is uh as something that is a uh a broadly practiced sort of consumer practice having pets special animals that are family members and who consume in the house with you uh was something that was reserved for you know only the aristocracy you know they would have lap dogs or other kinds of pet animals so that were just maybe just you know for comfort or might have been symbolic um but now it's a it's a sort of a mass consumer practice Erica do you think that this might also be an extension of domestication practices because I wasn't keeping of pigs or chickens also bringing them into the domus bringing them into the home um or is there something fundamentally different here with how pigs and chickens are brought into the home to how dogs and cats are brought into the home so I I think I think there's the diff there are different species brought into the home at different times, right?

Erica Hill 50:51

I mean and different so I'm I'm sort of wondering about the issue of pets because at different points in time in the past animals as varied as bears, macaws and dogs have all been brought into the house by different groups of people throughout time and one of the things I struggle with as an archaeologist is exactly the the time depth of pets right like how how how long have people been keeping pets? I mean there the I knew folks in in northern Japan would bring bear a bear into the house feed the animal in the house take the animal for a walk give the animal two toys that's uh that's documented um and you know is that a pet not not certainly not in the modern way that Susan's talking about but it's it's a household animal for a short amount of time that is that is later actually sacrificed. And so of course that would defy our our definition of pet, right? You don't by definition sacrifice your pet. But

Pets, Cruelty, Sanitised Living

Erica Hill 52:01

I guess I I worry that we're privileging I don't know I don't know I'm I'm still struggling with this right I I I I wonder if our idea of pets is is modern or if it's just the most recent iteration of keeping certain types selecting certain types of animals for very privileged positions in the household.

Susan Nance 52:25

I don't know I don't think that actually answers your question but no I I think you're right though I think it's it's a spectrum rather than a sort of an on and off you know pets started in 1880 or you know it's not that kind of a thing because uh before people were able to go and adopt from a shelter or to or before that purchase a bred an animal that was bred as pet stock when people had pets it was animals they collected from the environment right and children have done that forever and and you know before the modern period kids were encouraged to go out in when you know in rural places where they lived and grab snakes or you know put animals in jars and sort of in investigate the environment in that way. And a lot of those animals didn't live for very long you know or they or you know with the case with the bears I wonder if people are capturing cubs and you keep the bear for a while but not his whole lifespan necessarily that's exactly it. So it's a spectrum yeah because again people I think some we're just a lot of people are wired to have that to be drawn to other species in some and it depends where you live and when you live how that manifests. If we were talking about the history of you know uh Central Africa it would be a very different story right we're talking about the sort of modern consumer societies in Europe or North America they're all sort of on one timeline with one pattern um in other places they would need a whole which is a great reason for our journal uh because we need more research on all those other parts of the world.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 54:14

Yeah I I know uh Jennifer Robinson has done work uh on what she calls the ordinary city and she's I mean this is urban geography here but she's saying there's this idea of kind of conceiving of modernity and of cities through the prism of uh North American and Western cities somehow those are the gold standard those are the examples of what it means to be modern uh to be a modern city um but actually any city is currently a modern city and there are many ways to be modern um so what this means matters right how it's materially come to fruition well and then you know in terms of these phenomena that are specific to the modern period whenever you put it uh on your timeline the use of animals as experimental tools is also a really important one something that um is uh you know a few hundred years old it in the modernity that I'm talking about in North America it was on an industrial scale where you know knockout mice or transgenic mice or these beagles that we were talking about are being mass produced by animal producers that sell them to researchers.

Susan Nance 55:27

That is something that uh animals didn't have to cope with you know before the 20th century really.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 55:34

I think that that's what's also central to what you were saying about pet keeping actually is there's the the breeding mechanism. So I think maybe we've got pets we've got the idea of domestication or making animals docile in different ways but there's something to the kind of breeding and

Breeding, Scale, And Time Depth

Claudia Hirtenfelder 55:52

continuous reproduction of animals to sustain these systems that seems markedly different, right?

Erica Hill 55:58

So yes capital is part of it making money uh is part of it intensification is part of it but to do that to make money to intensify you have to breed you have to make more pets you have to make more lab animals you have to kind of and and that seems to be a global phenomenon right if we're focusing on cities sure but we are all subject to kind of these modern demands and pressures and animals are also subject to these modern demands and pressures in in ways that are really fundamental I think yeah I want to push back a little bit on I mean and I see what you're talking about the intensification of of breeding of you know mice for for certain experimental practices and and breeding of bulldogs for you know very specific uh characteristics but that selective breeding has been going on for thousands of years right I mean we've that's we've been choosing particular characteristics of chickens and particular characteristics of sheep and for wool and you know who's a really good selective breeder were the Incas, apparently you know selecting for very specific characteristics in the wool of Yamas and alpacas for very, very high quality. So I mean it's not on the industrial well actually for the Incas it almost wasn't on an industrial scale but you know it's not exactly the same as these modern examples you're talking about but animals have been selectively bred and for in in some cases forced to breed in in in very controlled human conditions for a long, long time, albeit again not on the scale that we're talking about.

Susan Nance 57:43

This is why it's important to have the archaeologist here. I love to hear that I love to hear that you have you have because it's very easy when you're it's this is a problem when you study history you discover something taking place in a time that you're studying and you think well this has never happened before and generally you're wrong if you think that uh so it's always if these things are it's just always about um spectra or things being sort of on a spectrum or uh you know where things sort of are maybe simmering along and then in the modern period they sort of explode just because technology creates the you know the conditions for that or you know it's human this the human population has grown certain wild species have really suffered and we're going through the you know this mass extinction event right now but the number of hogs meat hogs and poultry layers and and broilers as they're called and you know other kinds of animals has just exploded globally because we're mass breeding them.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 58:55

Their numbers have exploded but the number of types have diminished. So you know the the you might have more pigs and more cows than ever before but the breeds of pigs and the breeds of cows uh that currently exist have diminished drastically because of this so I mean I I hear your point Erica we've been selectively breeding for a long time but I think how we selectively breed has the the nature of that selection has perhaps changed and has become more and more specialized and focused on um well I don't know I mean maybe this is also maybe this is born of the idea that you know we look at histories and then we think about English history and we're focused on what the English did at a particular moment in time and the English start breeding and keeping herd books and stud books and then it seems like oh this is a new thing because the English are doing it so it's modern when in actual fact it's um a it's something that many other cultures have been doing for a long time and they've had other ways of documenting and keeping track of the ways in which animals have been bred. So is it really modern you know question mark that's the so maybe there are two things going on here the kind of privileging of English voices and science over indigenous peoples' voices and science um but perhaps also different ways of breeding and and a kind of um not not a specialization a standardization a geographical standardization of how breeding happens that's led to a diminishment of the types of animals you see yeah I don't know maybe I was just putting too many big words in there to sound like diminishment specialization something's a stick you know the intensification is really uh an important point that you both have mentioned you know the intensification is something we've never and I I absolutely can get on board with that right that the in how intense and focused these efforts are uh some you know they're capitalized right there they've got um they've got money behind them uh and that's something absolutely we haven't seen in the past to the extent but as an archaeologist you know we're always looking for when did this first happen?

Erica Hill 1:01:05

When what's the origins of this? And whatever the phenomenon is, you know, whether it's the

Is Species A Modern Category

Erica Hill 1:01:11

earliest pet or the earliest you know um you know industrial breeding or the earliest you know uh urbanization of human and it's always there's always an earlier date that we can find right there it always we're always trying to push it back and I think that's something that that archaeology can really bring to animal history is the time depth just as you said the time depth of of some of these practices but not all of them right and and no I agree I agree um okay so to kind of summarize what we've got we've we've jumped around a bit with modernity modernity is difficult to define it comes and can be understood at different time periods depending on where you are um but it does seem to have relationships with the kind of ideas of secularization capitalism intensification um industrialization and also that with it it's not just technological changes but also changes in ideas and some of these changes include things like emerging ideas with regards to cruelty emerging ideas with regards to sanitization emerging ideas with regards to how different species of animals can and should be kept in the home and cared for and all of these um are kind of neighboring concepts and ideas that seem to sit close to or in the shadow of this big behemoth idea of modernity but maybe modernity is in and of itself a problematic concept because there is always something that comes before.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:02:43

So you should always hold it in suspension because at the end of the day we still have to do the empirical work.

Erica Hill 1:02:49

Is there anything you think I'm missing um in this kind of our conversation that we've had so far about modernity that you think listeners should definitely hear about and know about yeah I'd like to add and actually this might be um a good place for me to read my quote because one of the things in preparing for this uh interview that I was thinking about was the concept of whether the idea of a species is a modern concept. And species is something I struggle a lot with and I and it's it's obviously it's obviously you know embedded in modernity. I don't know if it's a a thoroughly modern concept someone would probably tell me that you know it originated in ancient Greece or something but but the idea of species that um and animals is these discrete packages of of physical features and characteristics which you know the the the dogs destabilize to a certain extent right um but uh so I I want to read this this quote from uh from our first issue of Animal History it's in an article called what is um what is animal prehistory by Shimon Hussein who's just a brilliant um archaeologist and he says in fact human and animal must be so recognized as historical products of continuous negotiative interactions rather than as categories transcending their situated becoming and that's you know it's a it's a complicated concept but he's getting at the idea that that the idea any any package of an animal any animal package any species is also itself a product of historical negotiation and historical it's a historical product um and as an archaeologist who works with the concept of species all the time and uses it as the foundation for how I think about the world oh which species are present here he's saying hey species aren't you know they're they're a historical product as well and that concept is itself maybe a modern idea that wasn't operative in the past and maybe um is in overly influencing how we think about and construct our histories.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:05:07

I tend to agree with you and I think the the categorizations I think as humans we're prone to categorize and put things into fine patterns and fine but I think the modern I mean even if you look at like late 19th century documents you see this kind of process of categorization becoming more and more specialized more columns being added more rows being added more differentiation kind of happening and I think that that is a a a modern phenomenon and I think every from Linnaeus right this idea that you can start to put specific categories into specific boxes, you know, has had implications for humans and animals in in a variety of different ways. And yeah I think you're exactly right. I think this is a a modern thing and and we should definitely critique the label. You know and you know what's interesting about species is I think depending Who you are biologists or environmental scientists or archaeologists will often operate at the level of species. I think the lay folk often operate at this level of order, which I know biologists would never talk about order, right? But I speak about bats. I'm like, look at the bats. You know, I don't speak about specific types or species of bats. A lot of us in our imaginaries were operating at a much broader level. Um yeah, it's it's an interesting idea, I agree with you. I think it's a really interesting idea.

Susan Nance 1:06:27

When you really uh it's important to question any of these sort of shorthand ideas or ways that uh that we come up with or ways that we uh have worked, and I mean we as all of humanity, going back a number of centuries, uh, to try to simplify the natural world and make it comprehensible. It's necessary to always question where these come from and not take them for granted. It can also uh make things seem

Entertainment Animals And Selective Seeing

Susan Nance 1:07:00

um out of control and completely just like does anything exist? What what does anything mean? Uh so you have to be a little bit comfortable with uh that kind of discomfort of knowing that uh anything that you've sort of connected to or used as an anchor, well, that could be questioned two, and maybe it wasn't quite what you thought it was.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:07:23

Yeah, I think there is that double move because I, you know, I think there is a postmodern tendency to say like everything all at once. Yes, yes. But I think categories also matter, they're functional, they they they move things in the world, and those can happen in good ways, bad ways, in more complex ways. So it's more a matter of just uh as you suggested, Erica, questioning those categories and what work they're doing, right? What does it mean to, you know, like what we were doing earlier on in the conversation when we're speaking about beagles, as though like beagles was this, you know, standardized phrase or bears. You know, to I guess when you hold that in suspension, you you get to question a little bit more what exactly do I mean when I say beagle or bear? Um that's deserving of more attention, um, which is really helpful. Um, Susan, do you have your quote ready?

Susan Nance 1:08:15

I do. Uh and it's from Keith Thomas, Man in the Natural World, uh, a classic text from 1983, I think it is. And because I study animals in entertainment, um, I'm always interested in why in these sort of advanced consumer societies that I study, that consumers are interested in spectacles of uh that use employ animals and sort of you know what what they're using them for. So this is so Keith Thomas has this wonderful idea about the con the contradiction where people are consuming more and more animals and that in different ways that makes life more comfortable, but there's this guilt, this creeping sense of guilt at the same time. He says, and he uh so Man in the Natural World is a book about uh England between 1500 and 1800, so early modern England. The early modern period have thus generated feelings which would make it increasingly hard for men to come to terms with the uncompromising methods by which the dominance of their species had been secured. On the one hand, they saw an incalculable increase in the comfort and physical well-being or welfare of human beings. On the other, they perceived a ruthless exploitation of other forms of animate life. There was thus a growing conflict between the new sensibilities and the material foundations of human society. A mixture of compromise and concealment has so far prevented this conflict from having to be fully resolved. But the issue cannot be completely evaded and it can be relied upon to recur re-recur. It is one of the contradictions upon which modern civilization may be said to rest, about its ultimate consequences. We can only speculate. So I that is an idea that just is woven through everything I study. So I often, you know, think about Keith Thomas and how he figured that out all those years ago, 45 years ago.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:10:26

Yeah, it's an incredible book. I I read one of your um articles that referenced him and I went and I looked at it before we spoke today. It looks like a really amazing, I mean, it's many of the themes that we're busy asking and grappling with still today. Yeah. Yeah. Which is quite remarkable. Um, I realize as you were saying that, that you you said you focus on entertainment animals, and we've we've spent a great deal of time, I think, talking about wild and liminal animals and also domesticated animals. But what do you think uh, yeah, what do you think is particularly modern about entertainment animals and and the ways that they are used as spectacles?

Susan Nance 1:11:05

Uh, I think when uh the fact that they're mediated, meaning that people often know about them not through direct, you know, witnessing or experience, but through representations of them in uh now, especially electronic media. But in the 19th century, it would have been photogra uh drawings of uh well-known animals that one found in advertisements for the circus in the newspaper, or trade cards that might have had a um, or a cigarette card, you know, a little sort of gift insert that came in the cigarettes, or trade cards that people picked up at the store and, you know, uh kept his souvenirs that might have had a depiction of a famous racehorse on, or um Jumbo the elephant became famous in this way from having been talked about in the newspaper and celebrated as a known individual whom people followed, followed him in the news. What is he doing now? What has happened to him? But they would never meet this person, this being. Uh, it was a parasocial relationship. He became not just a famous animal, but ultimately a celebrity when people were following news of his uh sale from the London Zoo when he came over to work in the United States, the Barnaby Bailey Circus, and then eventually was killed. That kind of relationship with uh people having emotional relationships with animals they'll never meet. That seems very important to the that sort of concealment that Keith Thomas was talking about, where we could focus on this one celebrated individual, and then we don't have to think about what's going on in the background. In Jumbo's example, or Jumbo's case, he became famous and celebrated andor infamous. Some people just didn't like elephants and thought they were terrifying at the time. Um, at the height of some of the worst slaughter of elephants in Africa for the ivory trade. And the herds that Jumbo came from in the Sudan were hunted out of existence uh while he was traveling around the world as a famous individual. Another example of this that comes along a little bit later is there's a number of dogs that played Lassie, uh, the, you know, the TV and film character Lassie and novel, novelized character Lassie. So this is also a kind of a function of the sort of modern consumer uh attitude that wants to focus on certain sort of celebrated or special animals. Lassie became very famous as a character played by a number of dogs. A lot of people thought it was the same dog the whole time. But the character actually consumed a number of individual dogs who played uh Lassie.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:13:51

How does this relate to the question of guilt, though? If people don't know, right? So if they're consuming the famous elephant or the famous dog, um in the court, there's this idea that there's latent guilt.

Susan Nance 1:14:04

Yeah.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:14:05

Um, do you think people feel guilty about those?

Susan Nance 1:14:09

Yeah. Or they don't. Um I think that sometimes it the the animal spectacle can become a distraction or a way of focusing one's attention on a narrative that has a neat ending.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:14:30

Free willy.

Susan Nance 1:14:32

Right? Yes, yes. And um, I'm trying to think of another example that's useful for that. In um in horse racing, the horse that wins the triple crown is celebrated. But what people look away from, even though often horse racing fans understand this, is that there have been thousands of other horses that were bred and trained and disposed of when they weren't winners. Um, horse racing, I mean, thousands and thousands of animal bodies come out of horse racing, uh, horses that have been uh killed when they were still young, or break down on the track or become injured and have to be euthanized, right? It's it the horse racing, competitive horse racing goes through many, many, many individual horses. But if you look at the horse racing magazines that celebrate the sport, you know, the winners are pictured and the owners of the winners are pictured, and the you know, the the all the there's no images in these magazines of the dead horses behind the track, or the the pit at the ranch in Kentucky where or the farm in Kentucky where they're putting the bodies of the ones, the foals that were killed, because it could tell this one's incorrigible or this one's gonna be too slow. If the horse is a little bit older and maybe started some training or was trained too hard and broke down. Um, or the kill, the kill auctions, where there's many, many, many unwanted horses that end up being killed or sold and shipped overseas to be slaughtered uh for meat. Right. So you you have this where certain this contrast where certain animals are celebrated, and it's the story in the celebration often is that this is a product of uh human triumph, right? Like a winning racehorse is you know a sort of celebration of the trainers and the investors and the races and the fans, and rather than of human failure, that we only have this one winner. What about all the others that we failed? Right.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:16:49

Yeah, and I think that that speaks to what you said right at the start, that concealment is a kind of critical part of understanding modernity, or what paying attention to what is revealed versus what is is not revealed. So the celebration of the racehorse uh or of the actor dog versus the material realities that are that are that are obfuscated, that are hidden, or Erica, like you said, that are distanced, right? That are actively distanced from our imaginaries and our and our abilities to really, I mean, to feel guilt, we have to know. So I think there are some who do know and choose to disavow that knowledge in favor of the sport or of the spectacle. And then there are many others who don't know, right? Who maybe think that horse racing is completely benign and it's just a it's just a jockey and a horse having a great time. Um, but actually it's it's a brutal sport, right?

Erica Hill 1:17:40

Maybe it's modernity that makes that makes that possible. I think that's what you're getting at, right? Is that modernity makes it possible to get that distance and makes that concealment work um in a way that it couldn't work in many pre-modern societies. It it doesn't work because you have to hunt, you have to go out and collect those animals, you have to go out and kill an animal and bring it home. And if you don't, you're you're you die, right? But that concealment is possible. Modernity makes that possible.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:18:17

And and like Susan said, the intimacy, right? Because previously you had smaller bands of people who knew one another and knew what they were doing, and now the the scale and the size of human populations, of animal populations, means your extent and capacity to know is diminished.

Susan Nance 1:18:33

Well,

Rodeo Contradictions In Plain Sight

Susan Nance 1:18:34

and in rural places, sometimes the concealment is more just a community agreement that we're going to entertain a certain delusion that we know not to be true, but we're gonna participate in this anyway. So when I studied rodeo animals, you know, these are rural people who work with cattle and horses and sheep, and they they do work with animals. So there's sort of an exception to my rule about modern people relating to animals only as consumers. These are people who are producers, and still they use the rodeo sports to perform this these rituals over and over and over again that people know not to be really true, but they all agree. We have tamed this land, we have made this unwieldy place productive. We're producing cattle, we're producing sheep, we're producing good horses, and we are the ones who know how to do it out here. And those city folks don't know. We're the ones who are willing to do that hard work, we're the ones who are willing to raise animals we know will be slaughtered and sell them because people in the cities are too emotionally weak for that. They just want the steak in the supermarket. We're the ones out here doing it, we're the real people, right? But they in the rodeo, when you go to the rodeo, they participate in celebrating the roping horse that helps the guy win the tie-down roping competition, you know, and they celebrate the bucking bull in his moment of glory when he bucks off the cowboy that everybody, you know, knows or is at the top of the rankings. For that moment, they celebrate those animals. And then knowing that possibly that horse is going to be put out to pasture later, or maybe he won't be productive, maybe he'll sort of stop, he'll get injured, he won't be a workable anymore. And what will happen to him then? Maybe he'll get retired, maybe he won't. Um, knowing that the bucking bull, if he stops uh being competitive, might be sent to slaughter, right? And they, you know, so they they sort of participate in, they have a foot in both worlds there, where they understand the old ways of working with animals and are very frank about that. Not all horses are the same, they're not pets. You might have one that's a pet that you know you keep around, but the other ones are not pets, you know. So they they do that. They they understand that old way of working with animals and being present for every part of an animal's life, but they also participate in the modern consumer practices and beliefs that certain animals are to be celebrated, and they could be used to kind of forget about some of the ugliness uh in life.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:21:40

Yeah, that really highlights, I think, what you were talking about in your quote about contradictions and how um our relationships with animals are filled with contradictions. And these contradictions probably predate the modern era, or there are many, maybe they took on a different form, but even your use of ritual reminded me of what Erica was saying about archaeology earlier. And yes, kind of, you know, the the one concept that we haven't got to, and I'm afraid we we won't have as much time to dial into, is just the idea that it's it's it's culture as well. That's kind of running through all of this to understand modernity and the forms it's taken also requires not only paying attention to animals and the implications it's had for them, but the cultures what what the specific cultures understand or how they understand modernity. Um, because ritual is a cultural thing, right, Erica?

Erica Hill 1:22:29

Well, what we consider ritual certainly is. Um there's a lot of debate over what ritual is and whether it's okay.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:22:38

Like you said, it's a category we clump things in together.

Susan Nance 1:22:41

Exactly. Yeah.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:22:43

All

Submitting To The Journal And New Books

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:22:44

right. Um, okay, before we get before we go down another uh rabbit hole, as it were, um I'm gonna leave the the final word with you guys to just maybe tell me a little bit more about animal history. So if people want to submit to animal history, how do they do that? How do they find out more about the journal and the types of articles you're interested in? Maybe you can give us a cliffhanger of what kind of is cliffhanger the right word? Cliff notes? Notes. Maybe you can give us notes on what kind of um articles the the journal is interested in, as well as tell me a little bit about what you're currently working on and how people can get in touch with you. Uh Erica, why don't we start with you?

Erica Hill 1:23:22

Yeah, so um, as you said, Animal History has been published uh since 2025 by University of California Press. We are interested in articles on any aspect of humans and animals in history. Uh, we're really looking for papers, for manuscripts that consider animals as historical subjects. So we we really want that animal focus there. Um, but any time period, um, any uh region of the world we're we're interested in, and including both history and uh and archaeology. What I'm currently working on, well, I've got two projects going on. Uh one, the one I'm really most excited about is a book project. Uh it's actually focused in uh Peru, returning to an area of study that I abandoned a little while ago to sort of focus on the Arctic, but uh it's representations of birds and ceramic art of ancient Peru and trying to reconstruct it's it's why I'm struggling with that species issue, uh, trying to reconstruct uh categories of um sort of the folk taxonomy, the the categories uh used by um the moche people of Peru to think about birds and categorize birds. And uh yeah, uh it's very interesting because it looks like they couldn't care less about about little passerines, but boy, those big salient birds like flamingos and cormorants and macaws, they're all over those. Um, so that's my current project.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:24:55

Sounds fascinating. Uh, Susan, how about you? What are you currently working on?

Susan Nance 1:24:59

Uh well, I have a couple of things uh on the go right now. I have a textbook that's coming out this year, which is called Animals in Nineteenth Century America. And it is one of those history books that is a collection of uh edited or curated primary sources on animals in the United States, 19th century. So I'm gonna have to do some copy editing uh uh in uh June and July for that. Uh and then the other thing I'm working on, the big project, which I've been working on for a long time now, uh, is a history of the uh, okay, uh the sim the the so public facing would be the uh history of the exotic animal trade in the United States in the 20th century. I'm trying to avoid the word exotic, so I've come up with novel or maybe biologically wild. None of these is working yet, so I have to continue to think about that. Uh anyways, uh so it's a history of the exotic, the wild or exotic animal trade in the United States in the 20th century, grounded in the history of one city, which is Las Vegas. So I have made many trips to Las Vegas to look through every page of documents that they have in their archive, because a lot of this research is just really this needle in the haystack kind of looking through folder after folder after folder, uh, because the archives are designed as a record of human agency and human history. So often the beings that I'm looking for are not, you know, in the uh archival record for a document or the finding aid, they're harder to find. And um photographs might list so-and-so and so-and-so pictured at this casino. And then you look at the photograph, oh, there's an alligator there as well. Who's this alligator? Uh so I've been doing a lot of that kind of research. It takes a very, very long time, but um uh this this year I have to write a manuscript now. I think I've gotten to the point where I can't justify any more trips to Las Vegas until there's a manuscript written.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:27:11

Amazing. Both of these books sound incredibly interesting. I'm wishing you uh both of these projects and I'm wishing you all of the best of luck as you kind of get them done. So thank you so much for your time and generosity in the episode today. Uh, very much enjoyed uh talking to you, and I'll make sure that links to the journal and your works are in the show notes. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks.

Kingston Bears On Display

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:27:36

Welcome back to the Animal Highlight. In this season of the Animal Highlight, we're going to be looking at animals in Kingston, Ontario, which is where I did my PhD while at Queen's University. I developed this walking tour for a website called Stones, which uh details a whole bunch of local histories for Kingston. And I thought it would be nice to kind of blend it together with this season on the animal turn. Because we spoke Bit about beagles and bears in this episode. I bounced a bit between writing, I bounced a bit between talking about dogs or bears and ultimately settled on bears and the numerous ways in which individual bears have been put on display in Kingston. I hope you enjoy. Ontario is home to over 85,000 black bears. Because they hibernate through the winter months, losing almost half of their weight during that time, they work hard to find food in the warmer months of the year. Black bears can spend almost eight hours a day foraging for food and enjoy eating berries and nuts. While generally known for being shy around humans, their need for food sometimes brings them into cities, such as in 2021, when black bears were spotted in Gunanakwe and Brockville. In both cases, humans were cautioned against approaching the bears and reminded about how to properly manage waste. In the past, however, the fear of bears entering urban areas often prompted hunting campaigns with the goal of eradicating them. This happened in Kingston in 1793 when the city enacted a policy that rewarded hunters with $2 for every bear head they brought in to the authorities. On the other hand, Kingston has also been home to bears who were actively brought into the city to serve as sports mascots. From the 1920s to the 1950s, Queen's University had a series of bears living on campus. In 1921, the first bear named Gee Wiz was taken from Algonquin Park, and a year later another bear named Boohoo replaced Gee Wiz. This started a tradition of the student society keeping bears named Boohoo as sports mascots. Fed a diet of sugary treats and paraded around in chains, these bears were poorly treated by students. Furthermore, when the bears got too big to handle or too expensive to maintain, the students got rid of them and replaced them with another. There were at least seven boohoos between 1922 and 1955. Queen Boohoo, the first boohoo bear, was donated to a zoo in New York where she died in 1925. Boohoos 3, 4, and 6 were let loose again in Algonquin Park when their respective sports seasons were completed. Just imagine what it might have been like to be taken from your home, used for a season, and then randomly dumped back in the park in an area you might not know. Understandably, concerns about animals' welfare began to surface, so in 1955, the practice of keeping live bears as mascots at Queen's University was ended. Boohoo resurfaced as a mascot again in 1980, but this time as a human dressed up as a bear. Boo isn't the only bear to have been displayed in Kingston. In 1834, a polar bear was brought to the city as part of a traveling unprecedented menagerie of wild animals. He was purchased by Gregory Crane and Company in France to travel to towns across North America, including Kingston. He was paraded around and touted as a symbol of tremendous ferocity. One can only imagine how this animal, known to the Inuit as the Wondering One, coped with his extreme confinement. Today, polar bears and black bears continue to be confined and displayed in Canadian zoos, and hunting remains a threat, with over 40,000 bears killed annually in North America.

Thanks, Credits, And Sign-Off

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:31:25

Thank you to Susan Nance and Erica Hill for being wonderful guests. Thank you as always to Animals and Philosophy Politics, Law and Ethics Apple for sponsoring this podcast. To Jeremy John for the logo and Gordon Clark for the Bed Music. Thank you also goes to Rebecca Shen, Carlo Salzani, Herod Bond, and Christian Menz for their back of house support. This episode was hosted, produced, and edited by Russia. This is The Animal Turn.

Siobhan O'Sullivan 1:31:55

With me, Claudia Hood.com. That's I R O A R P O D.com.