Animal Planet

Harriet Ritvo

IT IS HARD TO COUNT the ways in which other animals figure in the stories that environmental historians tell.1 They are part of our epic tales—those with the longest chronological reach—about the movements of early hunters and gatherers. They are part of the grand narrative of domestication and the transformation of human existence through agriculture. They often have represented nature (however nature has been understood) in religious and scientific thought. Animals also play a large role in our novellas—that is, accounts of distinctively modern concerns (or distinctively modern variations on these age-old themes), such as species loss through habitat destruction, the simplification of ecosystems through monoculture and invasion, and the modification of organisms by means of biotechnology. Their ubiquitous presence has helped establish the city and the suburb as appropriate settings for environmental history. None of these stories—long or short—has yet come to a definitive conclusion: Certainly, at least from the perspective of the animals themselves, no happy endings are in sight. That may be one reason that animals have been appearing with increasing frequency in the work of environmental historians and of scholars in related disciplines. Another may be that many of the difficult issues at the intersection of academic studies of the environment (historical or otherwise) and environmental politics have an animal dimension, or even an animal-triggered flashpoint: preservation of threatened ecosystems, overexploitation of resources such as fisheries, emergent diseases, and cloning, to name a few.	1
Environmental historians are not alone in their heightened interest in animals, nor is scholarly attention to animals completely new. Livestock traditionally has attracted the attention of economic historians who focus on agriculture. Important animal-related institutions, from humane societies to zoos, have had their chroniclers. The history of zoology is a well-established branch of the history of science, most conspicuously in relation to the development of evolutionary ideas. People distinguished in their association with animals, whether as breeders or hunters or scientists, have had their biographers, as, indeed, have some animals distinguished in their own right—from Jumbo to Seabiscuit. Historians have investigated the moral and legal rights and responsibilities of animals, as well as animal-related practices, such as vivisection.2	2
Figure 1. Dodo. Richard Lydekker, ed., The Royal Natural History, 6 vols. (London: Frederick Warne, 1895), IV, 388. The dodo, one of the earliest acknowledged extinctions.   . . . There are about 6844 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.