Movers and Shapers
Online, 27-28 June 2024
All times shown are London (British Summer Time, UTC+1)
Join us on Thursday 27 and Friday 28 June for two afternoons of online animal history. We’ll have four panels of diverse papers on the theme of ‘Movers and Shapers’, as well as a keynote lecture from Professor Helen Cowie, Victims and Shapers of Fashion: The Ostrich and the Egret.
Meeting links will be sent directly to all registered attendees a few days before the event – book your place at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/movers-and-shapers-tickets-901644231167.
Registration opens 9am Friday 10th May 2024.
The programme is given in UK timings (BST), but we hope that, wherever you’re based, there will be parts you’ll be able to join us for if not the whole event.
The registration fee for the conference is £5. As an independent organisation without an institutional affiliation the registration fee will help us secure the funds needed to meet our running costs (zoom and website licenses) for the 2024/25 series of events. Your support is greatly appreciated.
Day One
12.55 – 13.00 Welcome
13:00 – 14:30 Panel 1
Better the devil you know: shaping the reputation of Tasmanian devils, 1908-1921
Ruby Ekkel, Australian National University
Preserved Perspectives: Shaping Historical Narratives Through Country House Taxidermy Collections
Emily Creo, University of Buckingham
Animal-Mineral-Vegetable Presence in the Films of Mary Field and Percy Smith
Nicole Liao, University of Toronto
15:00 – 16:30 Panel 2
Cold Fish: Technological Introductions & Knowledge Production in British Malaya
Ruizhi Choo, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Inventing the Industrial Pig: Food Residues and Pig Finishing Barns in France, 1860-1940
Marc-Olivier Déplaude, French National Institute for Research on Food, Agriculture and the Environment
“‘A Perfect Paradise for…Alligators, Serpents, Frogs’: Reptiles, Humans, and Florida during the Second Seminole War
Henry Knight Lozano, University of Exeter
17:00 – 18:00 Keynote
Victims and Shapers of Fashion: The Ostrich and the Egret
Helen Cowie, University of York
Day Two
13:00 – 14:30 Panel 3
Snake Hunt! Reptiles and the Making of the 20th Century City Zoo-Media-Pet Complex
Susan Nance, University of Guelph, Ontario
From the Desert to the Show Ring – uncovering one dog’s life in the Kennel Club Archives
Ciara Farrell, The Kennel Club
Seeing ‘Starboard’: The Scottish Polar Bear Trade, c.1900
Samuel Shaw, Open University
15:00 – 16:30 – Panel 4
Being serpent and deity in the 2nd century AD
Elias Brossoise, University of Malaga
The Lives and Deaths of Urban Pigs in Late Medieval France
Guy Erez, New York University
Shaping Their Own Stories: Learning from Webby Worlds of Aesthetic Pests
Janice Vis, McMaster University
Full Programme (with abstracts)
Day One
12.55 – 13.00 Welcome
13:00 – 14:30 Panel 1
Better the devil you know: shaping the reputation of Tasmanian devils, 1908-1921
Ruby Ekkel, Australian National University
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Tasmanian devil was an object of revulsion. The stocky, black-and-white marsupial was cast as an evil and implacably vicious brute who threatened settlers and their sheep. The devil’s profoundly negative reputation meant that dwindling population numbers were cause for celebration or apathy, rather than conservationist concern or scholarly interest. This paper examines the interventions of Mary Grant Roberts (1841-1921), the founder of Beaumaris Zoo, who studied and cared for Tasmanian devils and presented a starkly different portrait of the much-maligned species. I draw on diaries, visitor books, correspondence, scientific publications, and newspaper commentary to reconstruct the methods by which Roberts asserted her expertise and credibility, using emotional and relationship-based rhetoric that emphasised rather than obscured her role as a woman. I argue that Roberts staked her claim to expertise on her long-term, affectionate relationship with the individual Tasmanian devils in her care, proudly differentiating herself from other naturalists who mischaracterised the Tasmanian devil, asserting they did not ‘know’ or ‘love’ them in the same way she could. The savvy zookeeper presented herself as a woman whose first priorities were the welfare of animals and the wider community, despite commissioning the violent capture and live export of native animals. I further suggest that Roberts is representative of a broader trend of women naturalists in this period who successfully drew on intimacy-based knowledge claims to carve out space for themselves as experts and to shape attitudes towards wild animals.
Preserved Perspectives: Shaping Historical Narratives Through Country House Taxidermy Collections
Emily Creo, University of Buckingham
Animals have many ways of shaping our society, even after death, and an especially impactful form of animal afterlife is taxidermy. However, perceptions of taxidermy collections shift depending on the venue where they are experienced. While the public expects to encounter and learn from taxidermy in scientific settings like natural history museums, many are uncomfortable being confronted with taxidermy in a domestic space. One such space where taxidermy has been a near-ubiquitous, longstanding resident, is the British country house. Now, as privately-owned properties open areas to public tours, and the management of many estates passes to the National Trust, large historic taxidermy collections can be seen by visitors.
These specimens amassed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have outlived their own era. In the intervening years, we have come to better understand our impact on the environment, we are seeking to decolonize collections, and with the passage of time and property through generations, taxidermy collection displays have shifted both physically and in how mounts are perceived. As a result, these creatures are often overlooked, or worse, censored from the visitor experience. Yet displays of country house taxidermy collections are an opportunity for educational engagement, demonstrating traditions of leisure sporting, scientific inquiry and the gentleman naturalist, collecting mania, as well as imperial-influenced game pursuits. Through contextualization, these dead collections can bring the past to life: animals able to shape our understanding of the social, cultural, and political realities of Britain.
Animal-Mineral-Vegetable Presence in the Films of Mary Field and Percy Smith
Nicole Liao, University of Toronto
This paper will focus on a series of natural history films created by Mary Field and Percy Smith for the Secrets of Nature Series under the British Instructional Films Company between 1927 and 1933. Of particular interest are works whose subjects are organisms who move between the boundaries between animal and vegetable, the cellular and multicellular, and even definitions of life and death. These include the life cycle of slime mould (myxomycete) in Magic Myxies (1931), the freshwater life forms (infusoria) of The World in a Wine-glass (1931), and the spores of Gathering Moss (1933). The opening up of entirely new forms of perception as enabled by the pioneering camera experiments by figures like Percy Smith are clear, granting the plant zygote or even the simple cell all the character, movement and motive of a sentient being; Bazin himself notes “Word is getting out that microbes are the greatest actors in the world. Next year we will ask them for autographs.”
Expanding upon the intersections between the history of science and microscopic time-lapse cinematography, I will conduct a close reading of Field’s and Smith’s films from the BFI archives with careful attention to the technical challenges, processes and equipment used to realize these films. I hope to connect the history of expanded perception, the optical unconscious and the surreal back to the transformative possibilities of non-human presence through the film medium, collapsing the very boundaries meant to distinguish between the organic and the inorganic, the animal and the human and what constitutes “intelligent life”.
15:00 – 16:30 Panel 2
Cold Fish: Technological Introductions & Knowledge Production in British Malaya
Ruizhi Choo, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Inexpensive and nutritious, fish was one of the most widely consumed proteins in British Malaya. Whether dried, salted, fermented, or chilled, it turned up with “unfailing regularity” in local diets. This paper examines the efforts of the colonial Fisheries Department of the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States (a collection of territories commonly referred to as “British Malaya”) to introduce cold storage technologies to the diverse, multicultural communities of the Malayan Peninsula. Colonial anxieties towards food shortages – as well as disgust at the strong smells and flavours produced by local fish preservation techniques – led the Department to experiment extensively with technologies and techniques like mechanical refrigeration, brine-freezing, and improved insulation. Between 1923 and 1942, these methods were applied to economically-significant local fishes like tenggiri, chencharu, and kembong in an effort to improve the perceived quality of fish consumed, yielding new colonial understandings of tropical fish anatomies. Yet these imperial visions of cold fish were not always received warmly by local communities. Local interests, agendas, and imaginations hence also played a critical role in determining the pace of these technological introductions. By utilizing newly available colonial sources, this paper argues that technological introductions and colonial knowledge production in Malaya hence emerged from the interplay between imperial visions and local agendas. This paper provides insights into the ways in which Malayan fish and technological introductions were moved, and shaped by colonial scientists, local fishermen, and other historical actors in Southeast Asia in the early twentieth century.
Inventing the Industrial Pig: Food Residues and Pig Finishing Barns in France, 1860-1940
Marc-Olivier Déplaude, French National Institute for Research on Food, Agriculture and the Environment
In the last third of the 19th century, a new business emerged in France near towns, ports, and dairy factories: pig fattening. Pigs were raised in stalls and fed on food residues and various agricultural products. By the early 20th century, some pig stalls housed several hundred animals. By the 1930s, these pig farms, referred to as industrial by contemporaries, accounted for one-fifth of the pigs produced in France and one-third of those sold on the market. The paper will explore the hypothesis that use of urban and industrial residues as feed for pigs played a crucial role in shaping animal husbandry practices in industrial pig farming as it developed in France between 1860 and 1940. On the basis of printed material (specialised animal husbandry journals, conference proceedings, zootechnical textbooks) and the archives of the local authorities in charge of classified facilities, the paper will reconstruct the characteristics of the socio-technical system that developed around the use of urban and industrial residues for pig fattening. It will show that the intensive regime to which the animals were subjected had harmful consequences not only on their living conditions and health, but also on the quality of their meat. The main solution to these problems was to look for animals that could tolerate this regime. As a result, a new type of animal has emerged: industrial pigs, which were more suitable for intensive farming methods.
“‘A Perfect Paradise for…Alligators, Serpents, Frogs’: Reptiles, Humans, and Florida during the Second Seminole War
Henry Knight Lozano, University of Exeter
This paper will explore the environmental and cultural significance of reptiles – in particular, crocodilians and snakes – within U.S. accounts of Florida during the early nineteenth century, with a specific case study of the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), the longest and most expensive Indian War in American history. Focusing on species that have received far less attention than mammals in the burgeoning field of animal-human history, it will highlight how the presence of these reptiles shaped in important ways the experiences and representations of U.S. soldiers and travellers in frontier Florida. Although undeniably “elusive” species for the historian (certainly in contrast to “domesticated” mammals), crocodilians and snakes have left myriad “traces” in the archival record that highlight how much they mattered within this historical and environmental context, both as imagined and material creatures. Crocodilians and snakes frequently came to embody fearful Euro-American conceptions of an inhospitable, water-logged Florida nature – understood as in (disputed) possession of the Seminole and Miccosukee peoples. Moreover, I argue – through their collective numbers, mobility and sounds, and perceived threat – reptiles existed as an unpredictable yet persistent ecological presence that shaped the history of Florida as a contested U.S. frontier – with profound consequences for humans, and for the reptiles themselves.
17:00 – 18:00 Keynote
Victims and Shapers of Fashion: The Ostrich and the Egret
Helen Cowie, University of York
In the 1860s a fashion took hold for adorning women’s hats with the plumage of dead birds. The craze began with British birds, such as robins, wrens, goldfinches and kingfishers, but quickly extended to more exotic species such as hummingbirds. Feathers – and later whole birds – appeared on bonnets, dresses, fans, earrings and even shoes. This led to a collapse in many bird populations and prompted the formation of the first bird protection societies in Britain and the USA.
Focusing on two very different species, the egret and the ostrich, this paper considers how each was affected by the rise of ‘murderous millinery’, assessing the role of both human and animal actors. In the case of the egret, a wild bird, the species was decimated by hunters, who killed adult birds during nesting season to obtain their coveted ‘nuptial’ plumes and left their chicks to starve. This made the egret a cause célèbre of the bird protection movement.
In the case of the ostrich, the bird’s amenability to domestication allowed it to be farmed in the late nineteenth century, saving it from extinction, but rendering it vulnerable to captivity, disease, selective breeding and – most visibly – potentially painful plucking. One contemporary speculated that if only ripe feathers could be ‘plucked without cruelty…is it not likely that mistakes are often made by the pluckers…or that the greed or need of owners induces to early plucking – as in this country it leads to too early shearing of sheep?’
The paper examines the ethical issues associated with bird commodification and shows how (often fickle) consumer demand in Europe and North America affected the lives of birds in Venezuela, South Africa and Florida. It also explores the question of avian agency, asking how the biology of the egret and the ostrich shaped their treatment by humans.
Helen Cowie is Professor of History at the University of York, where she researches and teaches the history of animals. She is author of Llama (Reaktion: 2017) and Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Her next book, Animals in World History, is forthcoming with Routledge.
Day Two
13:00 – 14:30 Panel 3
Snake Hunt! Reptiles and the Making of the 20th Century City Zoo-Media-Pet Complex
Susan Nance, University of Guelph, Ontario
This paper examines the snakes and men documented in long lost 1933 Marlin Perkins’ film Snake Hunt! Shot in Florida and Kentucky, the film is perhaps the first wildlife film to document wild snakes and their capture. Marlin Perkins was an American zoologist and television personality best known as the host of the television series Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Before becoming a household name in the 1960s, Perkins began his career by supplying snakes and other reptiles to city zoos and roadside animal parks and “institute” businesses, a shadowy trade that tempted many young men to raid the countryside for live animals. Later, at the St. Louis Zoo, Perkins used snakes to build rapport with visitors through “reptile house” displays that were among the most popular attractions at city zoos. In Perkins’ mind, he was an advocate for snakes, offering zoo visitors information about snake habitats and behavior to help snakes in the wild— although he, like other wild animal presenters of the era, may have had exactly the opposite effect.
Analyzing the film for evidence of snakes as living beings, this paper will propose ways of seeing Snake Hunt! as an early wildlife film that intersected with the growing zoo sector. It will argue that, although their lives have been mostly overlooked by zoo and wildlife film historians, snakes unwittingly helped support these institutions as “movers and shapers”—so to speak. Their presence in this 1933 film highlights the zoo-media-pet complex that did and still does characterize the traffic in wild and exotic animals today.
From the Desert to the Show Ring – uncovering one dog’s life in the Kennel Club Archives
Ciara Farrell, The Kennel Club
This paper looks at the archives of the Kennel Club, the UK’s registration and governance body for pure-bred dogs and, asks how the dog, at an individual, breed and species level, is made by and situated in this archive as a historical actor, both materially and culturally.
Within the archives, we encounter the dog as a member of the home where it is loved and dominated; as a competitor; as a subject of classification; as highly adaptable to social change; as a subject of intense affection and nostalgia; as a body to be perfected, and an agent in the democratisation of leisure. Reliant as we are on the human account, we can nevertheless examine how dogs might be shaped by and contribute to the archive by considering a case study of one dog and how he appears in the official and intimate archives at the Kennel Club.
Sarona Kelb was a Saluki born in Damascus in 1919, who embarked on a fascinating journey from the Syrian desert to becoming a champion show dog and a foundation sire for the breed in Britain. Kelb’s story unfolds within the Kennel Club archives, both formal and intimate. These archives, when considered in terms of public history practice and animal-human history, can foreground the lived experience of real animals as part of animal-human communities constructing their own histories as a co-production of entwined agents.
Seeing ‘Starboard’: The Scottish Polar Bear Trade, c.1900
Samuel Shaw, Open University
Around the turn of the century, there was an active trade in live and dead polar bears from the Arctic regions to Scotland. Bears were essentially a by-product of the larger whaling trade but, as whale numbers diminished, the number of bears entering Scotland increased. My research explores a single, albeit prominent, element of the Scottish polar bear trade, via an analysis of polar bears (and polar bear-related objects) associated with the artist and explorer William Burn Murdoch. Murdoch was a freelance entrepreneur who joined a whaling expedition in the 1910s. He returned with many illustrations of bears, written records of bear behaviour, bear remains, and captive bears. Among the latter was a bear Murdoch called ‘Starboard’, who was given to the newly founded Edinburgh Zoo.
Polar bears have been described as ‘most political of animals’ and it has been argued that representations of polars bears have been ‘reduced to nothing but climate change’. This paper is part of a wider project that seeks to address these issues by, first, shifting the political context in which polar bears are widely viewed today (from twenty-first-century environmentalism to early-twentieth-century trade networks); and, second, by drawing attention to the plight of individual animals, such as ‘Starboard’. The paper will foreground the role that images have played, and can play, in our understanding of the Scottish polar bear trade.
15:00 – 16:30 – Panel 4
Being serpent and deity in the 2nd century AD
Elias Brossoise, University of Malaga
This paper critically and reflexively interrogates the ontological boundaries between the human and the non-human through an alternative reading of the story of Glykon, a serpent deity whose cult thrived from Roman Syria during the 2nd century AD, garnering wide reverence even from Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Aligning with the conference theme of ‘Movers and Shapers’, in this study we’ll depart from traditional symbolic significance attributed to snakes in certain oracles and healing rituals in antiquity, seeking to delve into the “historical life” of a particular animal in relation to specific events of its era. Devotees flocked to the sanctuary in Abonoteichus to witness and engage with the large but docile serpent. Lucian of Samosata serves as the primary source for this embodied religious experience. Providing insights into the cultural context surrounding the deity’s worship and the complex power dynamics between humans and non-human, Lucian constructs a intriguing role reversal by anthropomorphizing the snake and zoomorphizing the prophet Alexander, who led the cult of Glykon. Lastly, by employing a multidisciplinary posthumanist perspective this paper aims to engage with the current momentum which allows to negotiate, without the excesses of the past, the supposed inherent dichotomy between reality and its representation.
The Lives and Deaths of Urban Pigs in Late Medieval France
Guy Erez, New York University
My paper explores the ways urban policymakers in late medieval France dealt with, and ultimately shaped, the lives of pigs as inhabitants-turned-objects in cities. Among the various nonhuman creatures that populated medieval European cities, pigs are perhaps the most visible, both as a crucial resource for growing cities – tens of thousands of pigs sustained the human population of 15th century Paris alone – and as a recurrent problem and source of anxiety for contemporary legislators and commentators on urban life. Historians have examined medieval pigs from the perspective of sanitation and policing, placing attempts to control their movement, to limit the location of pigsties, and to police butchering within a larger narrative of ‘cleaning up’ and ‘civilizing’ medieval urban space. In my paper, I take a different perspective and focus on pigs’ bodies and lives in the city. Looking at fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writings on pigs in municipal, medical, and literary texts, I will demonstrate how these sources reveal people’s close attention to porcine bodies and the challenges they posed to ideas about a discrete human identity. Far from being a philosophical debate, however, I argue that these concerns are central for understanding cities’ strategies of managing urban pigs and the solutions they came up with, which in part redefined the place of these creatures in the city, not as living animals or urban denizens, but as moveable meat – a solution that addressed concerns about human-animal intimacy just as it addressed hygienic and medical fears.
Shaping Their Own Stories: Learning from Webby Worlds of Aesthetic Pests
Janice Vis, McMaster University
This paper follows Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice’s assertion that “for all we know—and certainly Indigenous traditions teach us that it’s the case— [non-human] peoples have their own story traditions too.” (38). In my research, I read other creatures’ traces as more-than-human (hi)stories, pondering how we can learn from the narrative structures of non-human authors. In the proposed paper, I trace the webby creations of Fall Webworms caterpillars and examine how these creatures shape their own worlds alongside settler world-shapings.
I begin by examining these webs’ relationship to temporality. Webs’ silken strands mark where the caterpillars have been—they are a material trace of the past—but also gesture toward where webworms might go again—they propose future worlds. To the human eye, these webs lack the familiar geometric logic found in many spider webs, and so they appear random, confusing, and have often been labeled as aesthetic pestilence. But webworm webs are not shaped for an external viewer: strands are abandoned or re-traced based on the community’s needs, and despite facing decades of pesticides and forced removals, every year new generations of caterpillars write themselves into the forests, gardens, and urban parks. Nevertheless, human activity also shapes caterpillar world-building. Webworm caterpillars gravitate towards the border-spaces that supposedly separate green spaces and human infrastructure, where their lively presence and enduring traces interrupt colonial fantasies that attempt to reduce the non-human world into a passive, aesthetically pleasing backdrop for human history.
AHG 