Animals

“Presidents might come and Presidents might go, but the White House squirrels presumably could go on forever,” Richard Neuberger told his Senate colleagues in a 1955 speech condemning relocation of some squirrels to distant areas. Neuberger referred to the Eastern gray squirrels living on the White House grounds, who have amused and challenged presidents and staff at least as far back as Teddy Roosevelt’s administration. Publicized by Neuberger, relocation of these charismatic squirrels set off a firestorm, leading to framing of a history-dependent rationale for the special standing and protection of White House squirrels.
This paper compares and contrasts: (case 1) the aborted relocation of White House squirrels and (case 2) relocation of nearly eighty squirrels living in Lafayette Park (across from the White House) in the 1980s. Adopting a network approach to Lafayette Park, wildlife experts documented interactions within an assemblage of the park’s squirrels, rats, pigeons, dedicated human provisioners of peanuts, trees, animal welfare groups, etc. Case 2—resolved with squirrel removal—evidenced the limits and challenges of early network analysis.
Both cases involved the human-animal bond. Whereas in case 1 the human-squirrel bond played a key role in the squirrels’ protection, in case 2 emphasis on preservation of “historic landscaping themes” led to the squirrels’ relocation. In case 1 ecologists worked with the human-animal bond; in case 2, around the bond.     
The paper analyzes situational nonhuman charisma, convenient fluidity in animal classification (squirrels as pets, wild animals, and pests), and challenges to the application of network analysis. 

The paper discusses the survival of racialist ideas in theories about dog breeding in post-World War Two United States. Its main focus is the notion that dogs of the same breed share similar mental traits and that these traits are hereditary. This notion had its roots in the 19th century, when dog breeding was heavily influenced by racial science. According to race theories, the character of individuals is a derivative of their racial affiliation. However, when racial science was discredited after the Second World War especially this idea of the racial basis of character came under attack. Postwar dog breeding did not exhibit an analogous questioning of the idea of breed-specific mentalities. On the contrary: in the decades following the war this idea became ever more powerful. That had to do with the fact that after the war dogs started to be identified more strongly than before with middle class family life and were increasingly regarded as family members. In this context, one of the most intensely discussed questions about dogs in postwar America was what breeds possessed a character that was best suited to life in the company of children. On the other hand, postwar suburbanization also generated an increased interest in watchdogs, which in turn raised the popularity of breeds reputed for their aggressiveness, like the German Shepherd and the Doberman Pinscher. The paper’s conclusion will connect the historical development of such breed stereotypes to present-day controversies around the stigmatization of certain breeds as innately violent (“breedism”).

In 2016 Deborah Gordon proposed that the term ‘division of labor’ was misleading and ought to be abandoned. The problem with the term, as she saw it, was that it implied a division of labor among specialized castes of workers to explain colony behavior. In a series of experiments in the 1980s, Gordon discovered that observed colony behavior could not be caused by such a division. Gordon proposed ‘task allocation’ as an alternative description that allowed for a broader range of possible explanations, including inter-individual interaction in dynamic networks. These interactions can happen on short time scales, and Robert Jeanne took Gordon’s ‘task allocation’ to mean just those brief interactions.  Jeanne has fiercely rejected Gordon’s proposal on the mistaken grounds that she has called for abandoning developmental explanations, and that her account of division of labor distorts the productive history of the term as researchers have used it. In fact, the term has been used to mean a great many things since Oster and Wilson associated it with optimality modeling and sociobiology in 1979.  The reasoning in this controversy can be clarified with a framework Elisabeth Lloyd has called “The Logic of Research Questions.” This framework involves identifying what answers are possible and responsive to a given research question, and can be used to distinguish what restrictions the terms ‘division of labor’ and ‘task allocation’ imply.  With this framework I will disentangle historical uses of the term, show how Gordon’s proposal has continued to be mischaracterized.

“Owning the Evidence: The Lasting Controversies of Early Primatology Filmmaking” traces the unusual history of intellectual ownership over a groundbreaking collection of early comparative psychology films. From 1913-1917, the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler shot 6 reels of film depicting his experiments into ape cognition at an Anthropoid Station in the Canary Islands. Köhler believed that the moving image produced insights into the minds of nonhuman animals, allowing scientific observers to objectively empathize with the onscreen apes by documenting their gestures and expressions. But, as theories of behavior changed, so too did the meaning of these recordings. Behaviorists such as Clark Hull, Robert Epstein, and B.F. Skinner rigorously criticized Köhler’s interpretation as a projection of interiority beyond what the science could prove. In an attempt to demonstrate how the moving image might lead to consistent misreadings of animal behavior, Skinner and Epstein produced several filmed experiments in 1982 that reenacted Köhler’s films using pigeons instead of apes. These reenactments were meant to illustrate the limits of cinema as a scientific tool for revealing profilmic truths, but they also demonstrate the plasticity of scientific providence, in which a film’s meaning changes alongside scientific theories. Within this context, I argue that “ownership” did not refer to the material possession of a film or its patent, but rather to the power to define the discourse through which a film’s images would be seen.