Please Dont feed the animals Shirt
Animal history is one of the hottest and most controversial subfields in academia and in trade publishing today, although many people may not really understand what it is. In this essay, I explain the origins and development of the subfield, its interdisciplinary nature, strategies and topics, and the important questions animal history raises for all of us. To be clear, animal history is not a kind of sentimental animal story, nor an attempt to explain animals’ “points of view” or imagine them as a human-style minority group. It is not an account of human ideas about and uses of animals, although that history is an important building block of the field. While it can include the biographies of famous animals like Seabiscuit, Nim Chimpsky, or various presidential pet dogs, animal history seeks to account for the countless anonymous animals in our past. And, even though animal history includes some feel-good stories, much of animal history is difficult and even embarrassing to humanity. Of course, historians do not shy away from the shocking or regrettable aspects of the past, but document them so that we may learn from them. The question is: Are we ready for what we may find out, especially when we live in a place and time when so many of us are squeamish about seeing how the sausage gets made, both literally and figuratively?
Please Dont feed the animals Shirt
Collectively the field asks: Considering the impending environmental crises we find on the planet today, are we prepared to let go of the idea that “history” is primarily a record of human agency and instead see it as an approximation of the collective past of all species? Some historians and readers find that idea deeply unsettling. This may be, in part, since animal history asks us to consider the degree to which being “human” means being the supreme species on the planet. Some worry that to give equal historical standing to animals that were hunted, exterminated, exploited, or forced to endure suffering for our comfort (imagine the millions of nineteenth-century workhorses or twentieth-century sows confined to farrowing crates) is to question our uniqueness and right to do as we wish on earth. At its most unsettling, animal history is really about what it has meant to be human through our interaction with other species and perhaps make a change in the future.