S9E4: Segregation with Jules Skotnes-Brown

Jules Skotnes-Brown joins Claudia on the show to discuss how segregating logics were used to govern humans and animals in South Africa’s history. This includes everything from Addo’s elephants being driven, enclosed, and “tamed”, to Kalahari San people being policed inside a national park and managed through rations and confinement. 

Topics Covered:

•  The difference between environmental history and animal history  
•  Defining segregation as a ideological and material connections rather than direct comparisons
•  Addo elephants labelled vermin then reclassified as a rare “race” worth preserving
•  Kalahari San people policed through park rules, hunting bans, arrests, and rationing
•  The spectrum from pest to protected as a tool of governance and population control
•  Plague, sanitation, and health departments as engines for forced removal and spatial separation
•  How metaphors of infestation travel from animals to humans and back again
•  Animal highlight: pigs in Kingston, waste policy, hog cholera, and urban bylaw change

Date Recorded: 16 October 2025

Jules Skotnes-Brown is a historian of animals, disease, and knowledge production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910-1948, which won the Royal Historical Society’s First Book Prize in 2025. He is currently writing a second book on the global history of rats, plague, and capitalist infrastructure in the twentieth century. Jules completed his PhD at University of Cambridge History and Philosophy Science in 2020. Jules is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at University of Liverpool and PI of the Wellcome Trust funded research project 'Conserving Global Health: Biodiversity Protection and the Prehistory of Planetary Health' (2026-2031). The project will explore the historical engagements, collaborations and frictions between conservation theories and practices and international, global, and planetary health in the long twentieth century. In so doing, it will provide a prehistory of Planetary Health.

Featured: 

• Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910–1948 by Jules Skotnes-Brown
• The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political Historyby Jane Carruthers
• What Was It Like to Be a Cow? History and Animal Studies by Erica Fudge 
• The History of Animals in the Present Moment by Erica Fudge
• Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question by Bénédicte Boisseron
• Venus in Two Acts by Saidiya Hartman
• Vermin Beings: On Pestiferous Animals and Human Game by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
• Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe
• The Sanitation Syndrome by Maynard Swanson 
• Elephants in Africa by Frank Melland
• The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis
• Scurrying seafarers: shipboard rats, plague, and the land/sea borderby Jules Skotnes-Brown
• Sulphuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Fumigationby Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynetris
• Stones: Animal Histories of Kingston by Claudia Hirtenfelder
• Pigs Peace Sanctuary
• The Animal Turn Signal Group

Other episodes of The Animal Turn

• S5E4: Epidemiological Dividual with Christos Lynteris 
• Season 8: Animals and Media

Animal Highlight: “Eat Like a Pig”: Separating pigs from humans

Quote:  “The elephant problem, a term which I use as one uses the unsatisfactory phrase ‘the native problem,’ because it means to me much the same thing – the rectification of our past mistakes and the attempt to bring an old, indigenous and very different form of life into harmony with our own life and aims” from Frank Melland, Elephants in Africa (1938), p 145.

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: Jules Skotnes-Brown
• Host: Claudia Hirtenfelder
• Editing and Production: Claudia Hirtenfelder
• Episode Artwork: Rebecca Shen
• Content Creation and Support: Herre de Bondt and Carlo Salzani
• Animal Highlight: Stones Walking Tour
• 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.

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Transcript

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Welcome, Guest, And Listener Requests

Siobhan O'Sullivan 0:00

This is another eye roar podcast.

Jules Skotnes-Brown 0:05

What I was trying to do in the book with with sort of bringing animals and writing an uh interspecies, I suppose, history of the segregation era in South Africa was to kind of show not how the separation of animals into different areas and so on and um segregation of humans are are comparable, but to show how there are ideological and material connections between the two things. And that's a critical distinction, I think, the distinction between comparisons and connections.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 0:50

Welcome back to the Animal Tone Podcast, everyone. This is season nine where we're looking at animals and history. And in today's episode, episode four, we're going to be talking about segregation. I decided this would be a good episode to slot in here after Harriet's, where we spoke about taxonomy. Because taxonomy is kind of categorization, coming up with different orders of things. And in many ways, I think segregation and separation is part of that process. So I thought it would be interesting to bring in the conversation I had with Jules over a year ago now. So when I told you that I've been working on this season for a while, it has been in the process. And in fact, he was the first person I interviewed in preparation for this season on animals and history, because I got his book, Segregated Species. I read it and I immediately wanted to talk to him while it was still fresh in my mind. I very much enjoyed reading his book, Segregated Species, which is focused on South African histories and kind of land management as well, and the ways in which animal histories and human histories collide or are understood through one another in that country. So this also follows on really nicely from some of what we learnt about from San for Swart in the first episode. Jules Scotnus Brown is a historian of animals, disease, and knowledge production in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is the author of Segregated Species, Pests, Knowledge and Boundaries in South Africa between 1910 and 1948, which is what we talk a fair bit about today. And it won the Royal Historical Society's first book prize in 2025. He is currently writing a second book on the global history of rats, plague, and capitalist infrastructure in the 20th century. Jules completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge History and Philosophy Science in 2020, and he is currently a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool and a PI of the Wellcome Trust Funded Research Project, Conserving Global Health, Biodiversity Protection, and the Prehistory of Planetary Health. That project will explore the historical engagements, collaborations, and frictions between conservation theories and practices of international, global, and planetary health. We don't speak a lot about health in this episode, but certainly our health is one of the key instruments that's often used to kind of separate humans and animals from one another. And that's why I speak about pigs and the animal highlight at the end of this interview. So stay tuned for that animal highlight at the end where I talk about some of the history of pigs in Kingston, Ontario, the city where I did my PhD. Just a shout out again. If you've got a spot of time, please rate and review the podcast wherever you listen. Thank you all of you for listening. If you're not aware of it, we now have a signal channel, which is like a, yeah, I'm kind of new to this, but I think it's really nice. It's a messaging uh channel where we can just connect with one another. If you've got thoughts on an episode, I'm testing it out, seeing what it's like. So if you want to join the signal channel as well, I'll include a link in the show notes. There we go. Enough waffle for me. Thank you as always to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics Apple, for sponsoring this podcast, and to you, dear listeners, to listen to the show. But let's get to it. I hope you enjoy.

Jules' Path Into Animal History

Claudia Hirtenfelder 4:00

All right. Uh hi, Jules. Welcome to the Animal Turn Podcast. I'm very excited to be talking to you. I read your book, Segregated Species, right? Um, right here with me. A beautiful book. Uh, I was actually familiar with your work before this book because you've done some great stuff with regards to rats and some of the ways in which they've moved, you know, on ships and through different technologies. So it's great to have you on the show today, uh, speaking a little bit about animals and history with a particular focus on segregation as a species, as a species, as a concept. So uh thank you, thank you so much for joining me today.

Jules Skotnes-Brown 4:38

Thank you so much for having me.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 4:39

Yeah, of course. But it's really exciting. There's a great deal of, I think, animal studies starting to emerge in South Africa, particularly around animals and history, I think. And I think a lot of this has to do with Sandra Swartz, kind of being located there. You worked with her, right?

Jules Skotnes-Brown 4:54

I've I've never formally worked with her. Um, she's been a really lovely mentor to me over the last few years, but but I've I've never actually collaborated with her or been taught by her. Um, I did my undergraduate studies at UCT, uh, not as Stellenbosch. Um, and there I suppose Lance van Sittert was the uh main environmental history guy. So he was, I suppose, my introduction to environmental history, but his research is obviously it doesn't sort of center animals in the same way that someone like Sandra's work does. But yeah, you're you're quite right that it is emerging as a big and well, I wouldn't say big, but an emerging and exciting uh field in South Africa.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 5:40

Yeah.

Jules Skotnes-Brown 5:40

And certainly Sandra and her quite large cohorts of PhD students now are um very much driving that.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 5:48

So what got you interested then? So you say environmental histories um, you know, and and animal history are different from one another. Maybe you could tell us how you think they're different from each other, and then maybe unpack how you found yourself aging closer towards animal history instead of environmental history.

Jules Skotnes-Brown 6:05

Yeah, sure. Um so I um so first of all, how environmental history and animal history are different. I would say that, I mean, environmental history does encapsulate, in general, does encapsulate quite a lot of the concerns that animal historians have in thinking about nature or the environment as an agen of force that has shaped history in many ways. But animal historians in particular, uh, as the name suggests, sort of hone their focus into animals and their influences not just on human history, but also how they've shaped other environmental forces. So early environmental histories, you know, were concerned with animals, but maybe didn't put them at the center of their story in the way that people who identify as animal historians do. Um the question about how I actually got into this field, I have quite a weird trajectory in that I took, you know, I had a little bit of exposure to environmental history in in undergraduate, but it was never really my specialization. I did my honors dissertation on video gaming. And then I saw um I, when I was looking for for master's programs, I became quite interested in these programs that were mainly available in the US, the UK, and some other northern countries in the history of science, which I hadn't had terribly much exposure to at undergraduate stage. And I did a master's in in history of science uh at Oxford. And at that stage I was very interested in sort of museums and exhibitions and visual representations of science uh and so on. And when I was going into the PhD, I initially intended to continue uh in that field and looking at sort of visual cultures of science and public representations of science and museums and so forth. But very early on in the early days of the PhD, I can't quite remember how I how I came into contact with this book, but I read Jane Carruthers' book, The Kruger National Park, a social and political history. Um I'd always loved South Africa's national parks as, you know, spaces to visit I went to them as a child. And I I confess I'd never thought of them as spaces with histories, uh, because they're presented as these sort of timeless windows onto the past that have been depopulated of humans and so on. And that book really showed to me that these spaces do indeed have histories, they have deeply colonial histories, and it was really interesting, A, to learn from that book how how the foundation of this famous national park, the Kruger National Park, was so deeply entangled with the British and Dutch colonial projects in southern Africa. And second of all, how numerous species in that park that we now think of as beautiful and wondrous were were despised and shot out as vermin within the park. For example, there are records of the game warden shooting out lions, hyenas, wild dogs, cheetahs, and so on, because the purpose of the park was to protect so-called game animals, and uh lions and these kinds of carnivorous species were destroying those animals. So this was a big moment for me, and I suddenly realized I'm actually much more interested in environmental history and human-animal relations than I am in uh visual cultures of science and medicine. And at that point I had a little sort of mini crisis and chatted with my supervisors and said, you know, I really want to change topics, is it okay to do this? They were totally supportive of it. And so from then on forward, I tried to, I suppose, I wanted to change the PhD to do a project on the history of conservation as a and conservation and development of conservation science in southern Africa. And working with with with those archives, I slowly became more and more interested in the animals themselves and the centrality of the animals to these histories. And I read a lot of you know animal studies theory and so on, and at first I was a little resistant to it. I don't quite know why. I just thought, I don't I don't know, maybe it was a slight methodological conservatism on my part. But after a while, you know, people, more and more people asked me questions about this, and I eventually came to the conclusion that I needed to center animals as important historical actors in in my PhD and later on in the book, and that I also needed to do this in a way that was, I suppose, sensitive and compatible with the methods of uh the history of science.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 10:58

I love that story because it's it says so much, I think, about the journey of how ideas work. You know, you start out thinking you're going to do something, and the the evidence and exposure to different ideas compels you to shift. And I think sometimes we think that we have to be fixed to ideas and strategies and even theoretical frameworks, etc. But really what science and knowledge are about are shifting and figuring out ideas and different ways of knowing. And certainly I think you're right that there's been a lot of concern around how to position animals, especially historical animals, right? A lot of people will look at historical animals and say, well, how could you possibly know what they've done or what they're going through? It was really quite great to see Erica Fudge. She did a recent update on her article. You know, she started out with that one sort of left-handed blow, where she kind of spoke about there is no way to know really what it is like to be a cow. And I think just last year, or the year before, she came out saying actually, no, there's been a lot of methodological innovation. And it's actually quite exciting how much animal historians are finding ways to censor animals and to explain the ways in which they've experienced change and shifts in environmental histories. And I think this is where a key difference is between environmental history and animal history, like you say, is the acceptance and appreciation that animals are not just objects in these stories, that when these stories unfold, it changes their populations, their the way in which they can move through the world. Really fascinating story. And yeah, as you can tell, I'm also a big fan of animal histories and the archives. I mean, you got some great archival material, right? So I am some as someone with a background in thinking visually, you must have just been like some of the the maps you found and the the documents you found, those must have been a delight.

Jules Skotnes-Brown 12:48

Absolutely. Um, and yeah, I'm I'm always excited to to talk about this. I I really took advantage of the opportunities provided by the PhD I was doing to really travel around South Africa and go into some very underused, one of them not used, in fact, archives that the country has got, which have really incredible material and some of it in rather perilous state. I I I went on, in the course of my PhD, a fairly, I suppose, risky research trip across the country, in that I knew that there would be relevant material in the archives in Cape Town and the archives in Pretoria and some of the more well-known museums like the Adler Medical Museum or the Ditzong National Museum of Natural History. But um I identified in the course of preliminary research a bunch of historical actors who I thought were kind of key to the story of humans, animals, and segregation in southern Africa, like uh Frederick Fitzsimmons, for example, the curator of the Port Elizabeth Museum, who occupies a very prominent position in the third chapter of the book. And I sort of tracked down where they were and whether these institutions still existed, and spent quite a long time sort of connecting with different people and trying to get in touch with people within these museums who I could ask if there was archival material or not. And some of them said yes, there's material, but we're not really sure how useful it will be to you. Others said there's no material, but I I I just kind of made arrangements with these people and and and showed up. And it was kind of lucky I got the funding to do that because it was it's quite experimental to say I'm gonna go to this place. I don't actually know for sure if there's gonna be material or not. And thankfully there was pretty amazing material in basically everywhere I went to, which was the Cape Archives, the Pretoria Archives, the Adler Medical Museum, the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History, the Amitola Museum in the Eastern Cape, and the what it's now called the Bay World Museum in Port Elizabeth, which was once, or Port Elizabeth is now called Evecha. And that was where Frederick Fitzsimmons's papers were. I was really surprised to find because they didn't know they had them. And that was that kind of fairly risky research trip was a really important creative foundation to the work that became the PhD and and and ultimately the book.

Archives And Hidden Animal Records

Jules Skotnes-Brown 15:30

So yeah, I was really delighted to find the material that I did. And a lot of it was material that I was, you know, not expecting to find at all because I just wasn't sure if these materials were there.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 15:42

From my experiences in the archives, sometimes you look in places where you don't expect to find animal stories, and often animal stories are there. And it sometimes speaks to the ways in which archives are uh recorded, right? And the ways in which material is considered important or not important. And I think something also about looking at South African archives is, you know, questions. This is not only a question of animal histories being told, because there's another thing here when it comes to thinking about histories, is whose histories get told, not only subjects, uh humans versus animals, etc., but also in terms of geographies. You know, when it comes to environmental histories, when it comes to animal histories, there are certain geographies and places in the world that are privileged, whose stories are told time and again. Like New York definitely stands out for me in terms of a place where many animal histories have been told. So it's really encouraging to hear that if you just go to a variety of different archives, you will find animal stories. And I think this points to the overlaps and interconnections between humans and animals, right? An archive is simultaneously also an archive of animal stories.

Segregation Means Connections Not Comparisons

Claudia Hirtenfelder 16:45

So maybe we can switch now to thinking about this concept of segregation. Now, it's a tricky concept. Segregation has a lot of connotations to it. As folks from South Africa, we we perhaps have images of apartheid come to mind. Anyone who's listening who's from North America is guaranteed thinking about the history in the United States of segregation. And yeah, it's a it's a tricky concept because it operates in a way that's slightly different to separation, even though it's implies separation. So why don't we start with just kind of a brief overview of how you would define segregation and why you think that was an important concept to center in your work?

Jules Skotnes-Brown 17:28

Sure, yeah. Um, like you say, it's it's a really difficult topic to deal with, and it's very difficult in terms of bringing humans and animals together into this history. So, so how how I would define it, I suppose in the South African context, is a a I mean it's it's been well defined by a a number of South African historians who have sort of distinguished well, there's a big debate on on whether the sort of segregation era, which is before 1948, and the apartheid era were sort of a continuation of the same thing, or whether they were fundamentally different in some ways. Um I don't really take a position on that in the book, but I suppose I would define this as this colonial way of thinking and of administering different groups of people in order to keep them in uh separate spaces, separate institutions, separate ways of life, and uh minimizing well, complete separation is obviously impossible, but sort of minimizing interaction between these groups. What I was trying to do in the book with with sort of bringing animals and writing an uh interspecies, I suppose, history of the segregation era in South Africa was to kind of show not how the separation of animals into different areas and so on and um segregation of humans are comparable, but to show how there are ideological and material connections between the two things. And that's a critical distinction, I think, the distinction between comparisons and connections. And I found this uh in sort of developing this approach, I found this book by um she's a literary scholar of the Black Atlantic, uh Benedict Boisson, uh, who has this book called Afro Dog, and she has this nice um uh passage in the introduction where she sort of highlights all the problems of comparing the plight of humans and animals in the past and the pitfalls of saying they're necessarily the same thing. But she says there, despite this, there are close connections between these forms of oppression. These connections are ideological, they are physical in terms of how people are managed and how animals are managed alongside them, and so on and so forth. So, in the so sort of trying to transport this to the South African case, what I really tried to do in the book was two things. The first was to show how things that you would typically think of as being about animals, so for example, the protection of wildlife or the management and control of animal reservoirs of disease, were in fact measures that that were also to do with the colonial management of humans, which expressed themselves in terms of segregationist policy. So, to give an example from the book in the fourth chapter, where I talk about the control of bubonic plague in the countryside and the fear about the movement of rodents between cities and towns, I also tried to make it clear how the South African Public Health Department really thought that the movement of infected rodents spreading plague from place to place and black people seeking work in different parts of the country were totally connected. So they thought that that black people moving from so-called native reserves, which were these areas allocated for for or the the only places which Africans could farm in and buy land at this point in time. Um when they moved from those areas to cities uh in search of work, they were simultaneously moving uh rodents and uh infected fleas with them. And as such, advocated these medical officials it was good to keep Africans within native reserves and to put very strict controls on their movement outside of those reserves because they were supposedly facilitating the movement of these dangerous animals. Or in another example, in the third chapter of the book on uh Frederick Fitzsimmons and the birds in agriculture debate that I mentioned, Fitzsimmons is pro-segregation because he thinks that white people in rural areas have learnt what he regards as bad habits from their exposure to Africans in the same areas, and as a result are shooting up birds in enormous numbers, hindering his project of conservation, and in his views, hindering the what he thinks of as the evolution of white races. So he thinks that because they're shooting birds, it's causing degenerate parts of their brain to develop. And as a result, they're sort of regressing to the stage of Africans on his sort of scale of his understanding of how humans develop. So so he really advocates for again the control of Africans and keeping them away from whites in these areas because he believes that this is the cause of environmental harms and racial uh harms as well. But then on the other sense, the book also tries to show how actual strategies for the management of animals and the separation of animals in certain areas were then reused for the segregation of humans. So the the key example is the the the first chapter and the final chapter of the book. The first is on the founding of the Addo Elephant National Park and how these elephants are sort of driven into this um this reserve, and attempts were made to tame them and to feed them uh pumpkins and oranges and so on to sort of make them or habituate them to that space. And then the final chapter of the book on Kalahari San peoples in the Kalahari Femsbook National Park, where the same colonial officials basically say the same thing needs to be done, and that the San are are ultimately preserved in a similar kind of space, are provided state rations in order to tame them. This is the same language they use for the humans and for the animals, and they're managed not by a native commissioner, which is the typical official that was used to who administered uh African populations in Southern Africa, but by a game ranger, so someone who's who's tasked with managing animals. So so it tries so so I suppose to say in short, the book really looks for ideological connections between animal management and human management, particularly through the lens of various sciences and for physical connections in our strategies for the management of one were important for the management of uh the other.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 24:57

No, I hear you. So, I mean, firstly, I I I honestly didn't know that in the when you talk about South African histories that you could speak about, you know, the segregation part of our history. Like I don't know, is I don't know if it's common. And so I know we speak about our colonial histories, and even then, at least when I was in school, our colonial histories were pretty mute in comparison to kind of apartheid histories. Apartheid histories dominated what I was taught in school. Uh, but genuinely, like the narrative of segregation and segregative histories, I associate a lot more with the US, um, you know, thinking about the US and just that framing alone, like really starting to make those connections between how people are managed, who is allowed to belong, where, as part of a kind of uh a colonial logic is really quite uh interesting. And I hear you in terms of being cautious about comparing different ways and uh or saying that the logic operates the same way, while at the same time appreciating that the people who instituted these logics or these measures might have very well been making those sites, sorts of comparisons or equivalences, right? So it's a bit of a tricky thing to do when you're analyzing because you you don't want to necessarily uh collapse different human groups into different human groups or different animal groups into different animal groups or animal and human groups into one another. Sure. I mean, this is where nuance is key, but at the same time, kind of appreciating that the logics that work were often working to control humans and animals in similar ways. Um, and of course, I know Sadia Hartman has written about uh the transatlantic slave trade, right? And how slaves who are moved across the ocean were often recorded in ledges as numbers, right? Two slaves, three slaves. And this is the same way in which animals who were moved across oceans were recorded. And who died, who, who was actually so, in this way, it's a kind of it's a it's a very tangible way to see how their histories are entangled and how similar logics were used to control humans and animals. And your examples are so, so interesting. Um, you know, the the comparison between what's happening with the sand and the Addo Elephant Park. To come back to what you said earlier, the we rarely celebrate national parks. In general, we celebrate them as spaces that have been reserved for animals. And and in today's climate, I think we it's understandable why. Um but to appreciate that these are spaces that are very much managed and they're managed to manage both people and animals. Maybe you could unpack those two stories a little bit more uh

From Addo Elephants To Kalahari San

Claudia Hirtenfelder 27:29

for us. The the kind of the elephants and also what happened with the Kalahari San and the Gemswalk. Because on the one hand, you've got the vilification of a species, and on the other, I mean, actually in both, you've got a kind of vilification of the species, but in different ways. Uh so yeah, I'd love to just hear more.

Jules Skotnes-Brown 27:44

Yeah, sure, of course. Yeah, obviously for those who who've not read the book, the the first chapter of the book is an analysis and and history of the founding of the Ado Elephant National Park, which is a now famous national park in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, which is known for its herds of elephants that have these short or diminished or entirely absent tusks, which is interestingly a result of natural selection for smaller tusks because of how much hunting there was in the region. And the the herd that of elephants that became this park, I was surprised to learn were a very despised troop of uh elephants deemed to be rogue animals in the region. Uh the concept of a rogue of a rogue elephant is one that that in this period um naturalists thought uh elephants are normally quite peaceful and harmless animals, but occasionally lone males are expelled from herds, and this makes them furious and morose and and um causes them to attack humans and infrastructure and so on and so forth. So, this this region, um, which in the early 20th century was the subject of various settlers settlement schemes and orange planting and irrigation and so on, really encroached upon a land in which there had been very long African presence, but also very long elephant presence in the region. And as more of these sort of schemes developed, um, agricultural schemes, elephants inevitably came into conflict with these human groups, running out of natural food, going for oranges. And at this point in time, they were protected by the government as so-called royal game, which was the top of the hierarchy of species in the region. So farmers couldn't legally really do anything about them being on their lands. So this resulted in a sort of series of debates, petitions, and complaints from these settler farmer groups in the region about these elephants and demands that they be eliminated. Um they referred to them as vermin, which was interesting to me. And eventually the Cape government decides to investigate and they they put forward three options. The one is to enclose the animals in a paddock, they call it. The other one is to eliminate the herd, and the third one, which I found really interesting, is actually to tame the animals and put them to use on the farms they were they were raiding, uh, as was done in South Asia at this point. And ultimately, they sort of deem preserving them and in in the beginning and taming them to be really unworkable. And so they've decided to call in this big game hunter, PJ Praetorius, uh, to eliminate the herd.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 30:47

And he killed many, many elephants, right?

Jules Skotnes-Brown 30:49

Many, many. He he kills more than a hundred. And this causes a scientific uh and humanitarian outcry in the country and abroad. And the main argument that the scientists uh make uh against what he's doing is that these animals should not be shot out because they are a unique and rare race of elephant that exists nowhere else and should be preserved on that account. In this point, the the concept of race was used for animals as well to sort of designate between uh different populations of the same species that looked slightly different. And the British naturalist Richard Lideker and the German zoologist uh Paul Machi before him had both categorized addo elephants particularly as a as a different race of elephant. And so these various scientific organizations came out lobbying and saying this is a rare race that is in at risk of dying out, it's a dying race, it needs to be preserved in this park. Uh it needs to be preserved somewhere in this region, they need to be given land and so on and so forth. So there's a lot of back and forth then between farmers and and the state and these conservation groups and science groups, and it ultimately results in the creation of this reserve area in the Addo Bush, which is this very sort of thick bush, bushfelt area. And initially the elephants do not want to go into this area because Praetorius, by this point, has killed all but uh, I can't remember if it's 12 or 16. So they perform this big operation to drive them into the into the park, but even then the elephants don't want to be there because they have these memories of trauma and carnage from being hunted out. And so the state says, okay, well, we need to tame the elephants now. So we're going to we're going to give them food at these viewing platforms where people can come and see them eating and also sort of habituate them to humans and teach them that that that humans are are in fact not their enemies again. And then so so then bringing this into conversation with the final chapter of of the book, which is on Kalahari sand peoples, by this point had also been driven into a small and inhospitable area in the north of the country. Um this this desert with poor food supplies, but very good supplies of game. Game animals which were which were hunted by sand hunter-gatherers for for many, many generations in this region. And in the 1930s, the areas proclaimed, I think it's 1939, the areas proclaimed a national park. And this means suddenly these animals that were once hunted in this region are um protected and they can't be hunted anymore. And the state enforces this hunting ban by arresting sound people in the park and uh transporting them to Uppington, something like 200 kilometers south. Um, and then after they're they've served their sentences, they're forced just to walk straight back to the Kalahari, which is a really long way to walk. And this sort of begins to provoke a similar scientific and humanitarian uh outcry. And the same arguments that are used in favor of preservation of the elephants are used again. They say this is a unique race that has been isolated in this region and needs to be preserved because of because of their scientific peculiarities. They also say that um because of the history of extreme violence between settlers and uh sand hunter-gatherers, there's a humanitarian need to create a space for them, which is the same argument used for the elephants. And this goes also goes through a lot of back and forth, and there are various sort of public exhibitions to bring their plight to uh to the attention of the country, and it ultimately results in the elephant strategy being remodeled for for use in in the Kalahari, where Colonel Wright, um who in the Ado Elephant debate was minister of lands, i.e., the person responsible for land allocation in the country, and a decade later, during the San Kalahari San debate, is Minister of Native Affairs. He says to Parliament, ten years ago when we faced this problem with elephants, uh, land was allocated to them, and they were preserved in this reserve at a cost of, I don't remember how much, £20,000 or something. And he says, if we can preserve animal races that are of interest, here we must again preserve a human race that is of far more interest. So that quote really sort of made me think that these colonial officials like Wright's really view this as effectively two sides of the same coin. The management of indigenous animals and the management of indigenous humans. They see it as effectively a similar problem that needs to be dealt with in similar ways. And they they sort of remodel the elephant strategy where they provide the the sand in the park with with rations to live on. They're allowed to hunt a little bit, but they're supposed to be subsisting on rations in order to, again, they use the word tame them.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 36:22

There are similarities here in terms of the discourse used between the two. And you would say that they are not the same, that the needs, you know, if if I'm listening to you, I mean, I I certainly, of course, you know, I have a knee-jerk reaction as well to the idea of making comparisons with how animals are managed to how humans are managed. There's this kind of knee-jerk reaction because somehow it relates to the animal uh animalization of humans, right? Which exactly has a pretty sordid history of kind of creating animalization makes humans uh governable uh in a in a distinct kind of way, uh right. But, and now this is perhaps uh controversial, but I also think reflective of where some of the literature is now also having this conversation is were the elephants and the sand facing similar crises, you know, crises of having their land taken away. Not to, I'm not talking now about the um colonial response necessarily, but is there reason, and I know you're cautious of making these comparisons, but could one reasonably draw a comparison here without slipping into racist tropes?

Jules Skotnes-Brown 37:34

I I think you you could do that without slipping into racist tropes. I'm not sure I want to. I I do think that they, as you you put it quite nicely when you said that these groups were facing similar problems in terms of loss of land, loss of autonomy, and um encounters with a a very violent, invasive group of humans in the region. However, I also think that that historically something we need to be sensitive to in this period is that despite the horrible things that happened to these elephants and to many, many other animals in in South Africa in this period, this is an era that is surprisingly progressive on animal issues in a way that it is totally not on human racial issues, in that for the first time there are national parks founded where animals get these huge tracts of land where they can uh initially, you know, the carnivores are still persecuted, but later on they can live in these spaces free from being shot out by the set the hunters who are persecuting them for so long. On the contrast, uh oh, and and also there are there are increasing, and I saw this in these various periodicals I read as part of the book research, there are increasing crackdowns on animal welfare abuses. For example, harsh punishments for people um whipping horses or um abusing cows, and so on and so forth. So so in some senses it's it seems very still very backwards compared with where we are today, but in some senses there is some progression there. Contrastingly, in terms of race relations and uh racial justice, everything goes backwards, where land is progressively stripped away from African people in the country, where um their rights to participate in um you know the life of the country are increasingly lost, where more and more petty and ridiculous measures are imposed to stop them from that limit how long they can be in cities or where they're supposed to be at particular times, and so on and so forth. And what I what I noticed from reading a lot of mainly urban periodicals that were written with black elite or black intellectual audiences in mind, like the Bantu World is the most famous one. There are a lot of black writers writing into these newspapers and saying, why are animal issues being taken so seriously when African issues are not? They will say things like, The Kruger Park has allocated, you know, this enormous tract of land to animals while there are hundreds of thousands of homeless black people in the country. But then interestingly, that's not the only argument that some of these intellectuals, uh, most of whom are writing under pseudonyms, so we don't know who they are, are making. Uh, another is that animals have achieved this sort of more progressive, this sort of progression in terms of rights and welfare because of all these animal protection societies. And some black intellectuals writing into this newspaper say, Oh, we need African protection societies too, so that we have these bodies of people lobbying on our behalf. And then most interestingly, the editor of the paper, uh, Richard Seloptema, he has this really fantastic article. I think it's called More Land for Animals and something like that, where I was expecting the same critique to come out that you know animal issues shouldn't be given precedence over human issues. But instead he argues, he says, all this land has been given to animals. I don't begrudge the animals that land at all. They deserve that land. What I want is uh is a country in which land is shared between everyone. Um, and it's it's not a country where white and black or human and animal interests are pitted against each other. So I've been careful in in making these, I've been more comfortable talking about connections discursively uh and so on between human and animal issues because I want to sort of be historically sensitive to a lot of these critiques that make their way into different parts of the book. But I

Vermin, Protection, And Racial Control

Jules Skotnes-Brown 41:53

do think, yeah, like like you said, I do think this is a very important conversation to be having in in animal studies.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 41:59

Yeah, and I mean uh to your point, I I think it just again comes to nuance. If you want to do these histories well, sometimes you know it it might take you to uncomfortable places, but nuance, spend decent times in the archives and and being generous to the places you're you're looking at and the people involved, the subjects involved is important. Uh, and I mean something that's just really striking is whether you're looking, I mean, one you speak about pests obviously throughout the book and this kind of connection between pests and knowledge. But as you're talking here, it's also this tension between pest status and protect protection status, right? So different uh and and the governance of that, right? This kind of top-down view of who is deserving to be protected, who is deserving of pest status. And you see this, I think, very clearly in terms of the race dynamics you're speaking of here, also in terms of the birds, right? How you've got different birds that are framed as being useful or pest-like, uh, and even the switch and move of some species from uh pest status to protected status. And you see this, I think, most distinctly with the the elephants and also with the Gemsbok, um, Hemsbock. So it's it's really fascinating this tension between pest and protection and how they're mobilized at different times with different populations, right? So I hear you when you're saying, listen, at this time, animals were being to some extent afforded some protections. But on their scale, on these animals' histories, this is protection that comes after a decent amount of, again, depending on the animal, a decent amount of persecution, pest status. And now at this moment in time, protection becomes the one of the key mechanisms for some of these animals. Whereas black people in South Africa at this time uh on you know, there's conflicting and contradictory ideas of moulding ideas of pest status, animalization, uh, and then depending, you know, you've got the sand coming in who end up becoming. somehow protected, quote unquote, uh, in this colonial logic, which is quite different to how the Bantu um people were moving through the country. I think what the thread that runs across all of these, whether protected or persecuted or made as pests, is control. There is a control of populations, whether protected or persecuted. And there's a spatial management to all of these, right? Like it's clear that there's a geographical spatial management. And so it's it's not only a separation of type, uh, it's it's a material and physical and spatial separation of populations, right? Sorry, I I went on a bit of a it's really, really, really interesting because you're you're you're speaking here about governance logics, right?

Jules Skotnes-Brown 44:49

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I I totally agree with with with what you've said, in that this kind of spectrum of pest to protect it certainly applies to both humans and animals in the story. I mean, the most the most obvious human case being sand hunter-gatherers, who in the 19th or 18th to early 20th centuries were routinely referred to by settlers as as vermin. Um that's that's the word they used. Um many uh farmers in particular saw them as as a kind of pest animal that um was was barely was barely even human. So I I I certainly tried to to to bridge that pest to protected spectrum across the human-animal divide and across species divides. Um Klapperton Shokhanetsa Mavunga has a really powerful essay that sort of talks about this, I think it's in social text, called On Vermin Beings, which talks about the connections between the category of vermin in terms of humans and animals, and um how humans in in Zimbabwe, both in colonial and independent eras, descend into this category of what he calls human game as vermin beings. Um so he he was really the inspiration for me thinking about vermin as a category that goes across species lines. And then Ashil Mbembe's concept of of necropons is also really useful here in terms of you talking about particular spaces. You know, he th he talks about death worlds, particular spaces in which populations have conferred upon them conditions of living death, so constant exposure to death, whether through killing apartheid or um various other terrible procedures. And um I I that that certainly applies to to animals in this story too.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 46:48

Fascinating. And I I mean I I want to talk to you so much more about all of this. Uh just to maybe come back to the concept of segregation or segregated, um, I don't know if you prefer the shin or the ed, right? Segregated is in your title. Just to come back to that for a minute before we turn to your quote. So if we were to kind of think about how you're using segregation as a concept in your work, one, as you said, because you know, to see if this is applicable elsewhere, right? I could certainly see how it's applicable in in the US and in South Africa that have very stark race relations where I think the connections are obvious, but obviously there's loads of countries that have these colonial histories. So, how could this concept be applied to other contexts, right? And it's clear one, you're looking at the slippage of discourse between different groups, right? Two, segregation here, as you said earlier, is speaking about ideological and material separation. So it's it's it's how you categorize the work of creating categories and populations, right? And it also seems to me that you're not doing necessarily while you're providing animal accounts and autonomy, and you're not doing like a kind of bottom-up history, you're you're quite concerned with the segregation of the concept allows you to think about the kind of governing gaze, right? Who, how is their logic functioning? So, and and of course, throughout your book, and I don't know if this is central to segregation, is this focus on kind of disease, disease and health, right? Every single one of your chapters speaks to disease and health. And I'm not sure if that is central to the notion of segregation or if that's just uh kind of reflective of the examples you used. So, yeah, um just to just to come in here uh a bit more conceptually.

Jules Skotnes-Brown 48:35

Yeah, absolutely. Um so thinking about this uh in other concept, in other contexts, I mean I I think you can use this in in any geographical context, in which case in cases where there has been different categorizations of Pewin groups and different relations of power between those groups, because ultimately what this is about is the construction of hierarchies of life by uh powerful groups and where um different forms of life fit into those hierarchies, whether they are humans or or animals. And that I think is where it's of key importance to integrate animals into histories of segregation, because um not only do they inform how states have governed humans, but also um these states create these these hierarchies that treat that takes life as a as a whole and doesn't necessarily always separate human and animal life. Um the question about disease is very interesting. Um because and it it partly uh it partly reflects some of my own interests, but I do think it is very important. There's a famous paper from 1977 by Maynard Swanson. It's called the Sanitation Syndrome. I can't remember the subtitle, it's something like Bibonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in Cape Town. And he argues that the creation of the first African location, as they were called then, uh, in Cape Town was a direct result of the outbreak of plague in the early 20th century, where Cape Town had this kind of liberal, oh well, fair compared to some other parts of the country, fairly liberal tradition of race relations where you know all property owners could vote. Um, so black property owners could vote as well. And this meant that certain parts of the city were were not as rigidly segregated as in other parts of the country. But when plague broke out, uh city councillors immediately used this as an opportunity to get their segregation project going. They went around house to house, disproportionately targeting African houses, saying these houses are insanitary, the people who live here are insanitary, so on health grounds, we have to move them to the outskirts of the city. And they were moved to this uh plague quarantine camp called Eightflucht, and once the plague was over, that became a so-called location called Underbeni. And so for Swanson, disease, uh what he calls the sanitation syndrome, was the thing that reconciled these different views, uh, whether people were in favor of segregation or not, the the disease scare enabled everyone to agree that this action had to be taken. And so that comes up again and again in various parts of the book. I I was sort of mainly because disease is really interesting to me. I I did kind of look for examples of this. But also I think, you know, as the the Swanson article shows so clearly, it is really important in these colonial, in sort of getting these colonial states to take these horrible actions in afflicting people from their homes, um, in moving them uh to other parts of towns. And it's partly an ideological thing and partly also a legislative thing, because epidemic disease legislations in that period were really, really strong, giving health departments almost unlimited power to take action against disease. So in that way, you can kind of silence debate and um protests and so on by saying, no, it's a public health risk, you've got to go.

Plague, Public Health, And Segregation

Claudia Hirtenfelder 52:28

Yeah.

unknown 52:28

Yeah.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 52:29

And I mean, also the time, the time frame you're speaking of here, uh, I think we're we're in the like early 1930s or so here, right? Um, where we when they've got a lot of power, the boards of health have huge amounts of power in the early 20th century. Is this when you're talking here?

Jules Skotnes-Brown 52:42

Uh so the the article I was talking about is from I think it's like 1900 to 1907. But um, they throughout this whole period, you're correct that that the boards of health do have the these very strong um You see this across the world, right?

Claudia Hirtenfelder 52:59

Because this is when ideas of bacteriology are taking hold. Uh and and to come back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the episode, kind of you you said that you started out, your master's was looking at the history of science. Of course, like when you start to think about the history of science and the ways in which knowledge is validated, ideas of health and disease really shaped, I mean, urban policy for sure, but it gave, like you say, administrative power, like quite a bit of clout. Because at this time there was still tension between miasma theories and bacteriology. So there was a bit of give and take. And I think uh, yeah, I think it is interesting how health is used as a mechanism of segregation, kind of distancing and separating, um, looking at the histories of milk, it's also just really interesting. So I'm I'm not gonna open up another cat of words here, okay? Hello, bloody hell, you know, because once you open up milk, you're gonna go into a whole different uh realm of things. Listen, so interesting. Um, I mean, we just scratched the surface of some, we didn't even get into the tetse fly and sleeping sickness. We barely touched on how birds were used uh as uh, you know, your investigation of the farmers weekly, like going into weekly magazines and farming that as a resource, uh, just to listeners as well, like thinking about how periodicals can actually be really good accounts of how ideas change over time. And of course, your your episode, ah, your episode podcaster alert, um your chapter on rodents was just fascinating. And and again, we didn't really get into talking about how colonial knowledge and supposed quote unquote expertise and quote unquote native expertise, how these were often in tension with with the management of both people and animals. Um, how yeah, there's so much to read, so much to get into, and I really encourage people to pick up the book and read it. Um, but for now, why don't we turn

The Quote That Makes It Click

Claudia Hirtenfelder 54:53

to your quote? Do you have a quote ready for us?

Jules Skotnes-Brown 54:55

I do, yeah. Would you like me to read it?

Claudia Hirtenfelder 54:57

Yes, please.

Jules Skotnes-Brown 54:58

Okay, so this is a quote from uh Frank Miland, who was a um colonial administrator in what is now Zambia, um, and whose whose book he published this book called Elephants in Africa in 1938. And the quote is uh the elephant problem, a term which I use as one uses the unsatisfactory phrase the native problem, because it means to me much the same thing. The rectification of our past mistakes and the attempt to bring an old, indigenous, and very different form of life into harmony with our own life and aims. That was the quote that sort of made the the argument of the book click to me, and also the argument of the thesis that that became the book, in that it just showed so clearly in this kind of throwaway line, which is in the last page of a chapter in this book, I think, that wow, these these administrators really think of this as that they're essentially tackling the same problem, and that the the the ways they tackle human and animal management are are connected in ways that are important to history and uh are important in in ways of thinking about how I suppose South Africans think about different groups of of humans and animals to this day.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 56:23

So you see some of these discourses permeating the ways in which different populations in South Africa are still managed, and and managed here is of course perhaps better used when thinking about how wildlife are managed and governed, we tend to think about with regards to people. But do you think some of these discourses uh I mean, c

Jules Skotnes-Brown 56:59 Claudia Hirtenfelder 57:17

I just thought it would be, you know, obviously South Africa has a very interesting political climate and space and the the the ways in which I think these discourses that you're speaking of with regards to swarming and invasion and um pest status and health and public health, they're still widely used today.

Jules Skotnes-Brown 57:49

Oh, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just you know, looking at if if you go on Facebook and there's any discussion about Cape Town nowadays, very often you will see some really nasty racist comments from people complaining about so-called migrants swarming from the Eastern Cape, when it's you know totally absurd to think as people firstly of uh people as being migrants within their own country, and second of all, for for usually a white person to be making a claim like that when you know realistically our ancestors as white South Africans were the ones swarming and invading the country. Um, so so yeah, you do see this kind of language and these kinds of metaphors.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 58:43

Umly long shelf life, if you think about how long they've been in use to achieve similar it's a vilification goal, it's a problematization goal. How do I make this whatever population, whether it's an animal population, a human population, uh a problem, a disease situation?

Jules Skotnes-Brown 59:02

Yeah, it also points to the the very dangerous consequences of thinking about certain groups of animals in this way, I suppose.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 59:10

Yeah.

Jules Skotnes-Brown 59:11

And that the language comes back to haunt humans.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 59:14

Um I mean, and it haunts animals, right? Of course it haunts animals too. Not to disavow that this has pretty catastrophic that, you know, the more I think the idea of pests and vermin and stuff has obviously come up a lot on this show. And um, we spoke about it in the most recent season on Animals and Media. And you know, it's an easy narrative, and I think that's one of the reasons why it's had this lasting power across time, is it's you know, when you say things like it's natural, it's dangerous, it's a pest, they're simple narratives that people think they get without any explanation, but that has massive implications for whoever's caught within their grids, right? Whoever is framed as being this problem or this pest, it's gonna have, especially if they're framed in an administrative or governing space, it's gonna shape laws, it's gonna shape policies, it's gonna impact the ways in which you can move. Um that is really important. And it shapes people's imaginaries, right? How inclusive, how I mean, again, your history on rats, I think, is really a testament to this. Um, just those technologies, right? Two seconds before we go, could you tell me just a brief synopsis of some of the stuff you found with regards to rats and the technologies that we used to control them?

Jules Skotnes-Brown 1:00:34

Oh, yeah, sure. So um the the the last well, five years now, I've I've I well I've just finished this um collaborative research project on global history of rats and uh and plague. And there I was really interested in looking at how uh various infrastructures changed across the world um in response to the agency of rodents. So, for example, I think you mentioned it earlier. I've done I've done this paper on rats on ships, where I tried to show how um port authorities, uh naval architects and and so on, facing the problems posed by the spread of plague um in the bodies of rats, really fundamentally reshaped how various infrastructures and architectures were made to exclude these animals from from these areas, through, for example, installing screens over windows so that they couldn't climb into buildings or covering up any piping in ships so that they couldn't run along these pipings. Um I still point this out to people.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:01:42

So like it's this round discs. If you look at a rope that connects a ship to a port, there's these these round disks. So anyone who's walking near water, those round discs, if you're wondering what they're for, they're to stop rats, right?

Jules Skotnes-Brown 1:01:54

And and and to me it's astonishing because the the history, or at least the history that I did in that paper, shows that they don't work at all. There were two there were two scientific studies, one done in Cape Town and one done in Bombay. And they both showed that the rats just easily climbed over these things. And in other cases, they were just so so poorly enforced that you know there would maybe be a a disk, a rat guard, as they're called, on three of the ropes, but not the fourth rope. So the rat could just, you know, climb onto the ship in that way. So it's really I I you know I noticed them as well in in ports. Um and it's it is really astonishing to me that that these things are still in use. It must be an artifact of the legislature that was passed in the course of the 20th century.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:02:41

And they just keep it around. Wasn't it also your paper? Forgive me, I read it a long while ago, but you also spoke about how was it cyanide that was used to a different, there was something, some sort of powder, whatever was used to kill rats, and that ended up also being used uh on Jewish people uh in the Halloween.

Jules Skotnes-Brown 1:03:00

You are thinking, yeah, you're you're thinking of uh Christos Lenteris, whose book Um uh sulphuric utopias uh co-authored with uh Lukas Engelmann is the the book that that that makes that point. It's it's a it's a very fascinating history of maritime fumigation and the various technologies and chemicals that we used initially to kill microbes and later to kill rats on board ships, and it touches on some of these very disturbing and haunting um human implications of these technologies as well. Um, Christos is the the professor I've I've worked with for the last uh five years now on this rats project.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:03:40

He's wonderful. He's been on the show. We spoke about epidemiological dividual, which was a I'd never encountered before, and he was super generous and wonderful with it. Um and I think I mean this example also just points to some of what you've been saying, you know, this pursuit of keeping out or separating or segregating from how these technologies and these discourses can shift between different populations, human, different human populations, different animal populations, human and animal populations. Um so it's it's important to pay attention to them. So thank you so much, Jules. You did just mention that you're finishing up this project here with the global history of the rat, global history of the war against the rats or something like that. Um so you're busy finishing up that. Anything else you're currently working on? And if people want to get in touch with you, how can they do so?

Jules Skotnes-Brown 1:04:31

Yeah, um I'm I'm excited to say that uh from next year I'll be starting a new research project on the connections between um the history of conservation and the history of global health, which will take place over the next five years at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:04:52

Amazing, congratulations.

Jules Skotnes-Brown 1:04:54

Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. Um, so I'm really excited that that will start. I I'm hoping early next year. Um depends how quickly the bureaucracy works.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:05:05

All right, well, thank you so much for sharing your work, for giving us some insights into the the history of South Africa and the ways in which human and animal histories are entangled. Um, and just yeah, for offering us a concept chat to think with it's really, really great. So thank you, thank you, thank you, and best of luck with your your new project.

Jules Skotnes-Brown 1:05:24

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It was really great to talk about this.

Pig Histories Of Waste In Cities

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:05:32

All right, that was my conversation with Jules Scotness Brown about the concept of segregation. I hope you enjoyed listening. In today's animal highlight, I'm going to be speaking about pigs in Kingston. If you've been listening to the season so far, you know that a couple of years ago I created a walking tour in Kingston, Ontario, which is where I was doing my PhD. And that's now up on the Stones website, which kind of collects a whole bunch of social history walking tours about the city. And I Figured animals are missing from that kind of array of stories. So I added some stops along the way about animal histories. And pigs are one of them. Pigs used to be very much in the city. And as you'll see in this highlight, one of the reasons why they were eventually kind of removed and pushed from the city were fears around health. And this is, of course, one of the key areas of interest for Jules. And certainly, I think one of the reasons why many domesticated animals have been segregated from large portions of human populations. Enjoy listening. I'd love to hear your thoughts. However, contrary to what many of us believe, pigs can be rather picky eaters, and these highly social and intelligent animals are also very clean in their habits. When it comes to diet, individual tastes differ, of course, but according to Pigspee Sanctuary in the Pacific Northwest, most pigs enjoy eating cooked broccoli, pitted apricots, cucumbers, and beets. Only some of them like mushrooms, peppers, and sprouts, whereas most detest cabbage and onions. The belief that pigs have limitless and indiscriminate appetites loomed large in the early 20th century when Kingston officials flirted with the idea of using pigs as a solution to the city's growing waste production. Previously, official attention to pigs was focused mostly on their running at large. The city even hired a dedicated pig catcher in 1847. The question of pigs' diets arose in 1917 when the Board of Health received a letter from E. Burnick asking for permission to collect garbage from two barracks with the intention of feeding it to his pigs. He implored, I quote, It does seem an economic waste that this garbage should all be burned when it is quite fit for feeding to pigs. Interested in the efficacy of feeding garbage to pigs as a solution to the city's growing waste problems, the city clerk, W. W. Sands, in February 1918, wrote letters to a number of other municipalities in Ontario to inquire about their experiences with feeding pigs waste. Belleville confessed that they had never thought about doing so and would be keen to learn from Kingston's experience. Guelph said they were considering it as a practice. The city clerk from St. Catharines said the city had tried to feed pigs waste, but found residents were not careful enough and a number of pigs died. I quote, a great many hogs that were fed garbage died from the results of broken glass and other material being thrown in the cans. If you could overcome that, by any means, no doubt a great many hogs could be raised at very little cost. In Ottawa, the practice was discontinued because it had become illegal to keep hogs in the city, but the Health of Animals branch of the Agricultural Department of the Dominion government still issued permits for the collection of garbage from certain public buildings for pigs kept outside of the city. However, almost at the same time Kingston was exploring how pigs could consume waste, their very presence in the city was becoming extremely contentious because of outbreaks of hog cholera. And as pigs became more associated with waste and disease, their presence in the modern city was increasingly questioned. So much so that by 1920, Sanitary Inspector Carson made it his mission to get rid of them. On the 5th of April 1920, he reported to the Board of Health that, I quote, Kingston was the only city in Ontario where pigs were allowed to be kept within the municipality. He advised that the present bylaw be amended so as to keep them out. He continued the discussion at a meeting held on the 12th of April, where he said, The Federal Inspector, Mr. Baker, informs me there is no city in Ontario that allows pigs to be kept within the city limits. There are at present time over 100 pigs within the limits here. Close quotes. To decentvise pig keeping in the city, Mr. Baker started to cancel licenses that allowed residents to feed pigs organic waste. This affected places like Windsor Hotel, which have been keeping several pigs and received several complaints because of it. Pigs have long disappeared from Kingston and other cities, relocated to nightmare existences in rural factory farms, where their entanglement with issues of waste and disease continues, from noxious smells and overflowing manure lagoons to African swine fever. Sadly, the anguished fate of most of these animals is a very long way from the sociable and joyful lives of pigs at Pig's Peace and other sanctuaries, enjoying their apricots and cooked vegetables. Imagine a world where humans shifted from eating pigs to thinking about what pigs might like to eat instead.

Final Thanks And Ways To Connect

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:11:19

Thank you to Carlo Solzani, Hara DeBons, and Rebecca Shen for their back of a house work. I hope you've been checking out the blog, people. The blog has some really cool stuff, uh, and I'm trying to get better at maintaining and keeping that up to speed. So every now and then go and check out the Animal Turn website. Then as promised, I'll make sure that the link to the signal chat is also in the show notes. But on that note, thank you so much again to Animals and Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics Apple sponsoring this podcast.

Siobhan O'Sullivan 1:11:49

This is The Animal Turn with me, Claudia Hirtenfelder.com. That's I R O A R P O D dot com.