The proposed panel seeks to bring together recent trends in the history of animals, science, and the environment to expose how animals and their bodies participate in the knowledge production of human science. Our papers demonstrate that the knowability of nature around the world is directly related to human relationships with animals. Joseph Horan explores animal agency in Napoleon’s imperial exploits, finding that state power was fundamentally altered not only by animal actions, but also human ability to interpret those actions. Jules Skotnes-Brown interrogates the impact of economic ornithology in colonial South Africa, where it challenged veterinary understandings of disease and animal value from the 1900s to 1930s. Kathleen Thomas’s paper investigates the epidemiological emphasis on “wild diseases” in the mid-twentieth-century United States and how those control programs helped create a world in which humans could co-exist with “the wild.” Finally, Abeer Saha exposes the inextricable links between industrial livestock farming, government, and land-grant colleges, all connected by the reorganization of livestock’s relationship to nature.
This panel moves beyond reading animals as representations of human society to assert that animals have participated in the construction of societies. They and their bodies presented challenges to the human experience, crossing boundaries and borders and carrying disease as they moved. Human world-building confronted these obstacles in a number of ways, restructuring environments and altering bodies to bring the human and nonhuman into alignment.
