Show Notes
The global big cat trade encompasses both legal and illegal networks, with South Africa standing as the world's largest exporter of big cats including both live animals and parts. Vanessa Amoroso from Four Paws International explains how captive breeding facilities create a "conveyor belt of cubs" that fuels tourism attractions while obscuring the darker reality of what happens to these animals. Together Claudia and Vanessa discuss how loopholes in CITES allows for the large-scale legal breed...
More from The Animal Turn
Historian Michael Glover talks about what it takes to write animal history that treats cows as sentient subjects while still meeting the standards of rigorous scholarship. He unpacks how fieldwork with cows in the Karoo affected his writing. Topics Covered: Michael’s path into animal history through South African landscapes The methodological gap in writing historical animals as subjects Historical ethnography as a way of rebuilding past worlds from documents and ...
In this episode we continue our focus on methodology by talking with Frederick L. Brown about how he used municipal archives to conduct his more-than-human history of Seattle. We discuss everything from petitions to bylaws, pound records, council minutes, public health reports, property tax assessments, and city directories. Topics Covered: why urban animal history matters and why cities are always more than humanhow Seattle’s city archives make animal searching possible through indexin...
In this episode we switch gears toward considering historical methods. Sean Kheraj and Jennifer Bonnell come onto the show to discuss their edited book Traces of The Animal Past and together with Claudia they delve into some of the ways environmental and animal histories differ as well as some of the key methods scholars interested in them can use. Topics Covered: animal history versus environmental historysearching for animals in the archive borrowing tools from natural and socia...
Jules Skotnes-Brown joins Claudia on the show to discuss how segregating logics were used to govern humans and animals in South Africa’s history. This includes everything from Addo’s elephants being driven, enclosed, and “tamed”, to Kalahari San people being policed inside a national park and managed through rations and confinement. Topics Covered: The difference between environmental history and animal history Defining segregation as a ideological and material connect...
Harriet Ritvo discusses animals and taxonomy, unfurling the ways in which animals are categorised scientifically and in everyday vernacular. She unfurls what this might mean for how we know animals and the ways in which we understand and write their histories. Topics Covered: how classification systems expose human values and power why herd books matter for animal history and domesticationscientific taxonomy versus vernacular categories naming rules, authorit...