Animal Metropolis: Histories of Human-Animal Relations in Urban Canada

A collection that explores the growing field of animal history from a Canadian perspective, paying special attention to the experience of non-human animals within the human world.

Animal Metropolis brings a Canadian perspective to the growing field of animal history, ranging across species and cities, from the beavers who engineered Stanley Park to the carthorses who shaped the city of Montreal.

Some essays consider animals as spectacle: orca captivity in Vancouver, polar bear tourism in Churchill, Manitoba, fish on display in the Dominion Fisheries Museum, and the racialized memory of Jumbo the elephant in St. Thomas, Ontario. Others examine the bodily intimacies of shared urban spaces:  the regulation of rabid dogs in Banff, the maternal politics of pure milk in Hamilton and the circulation of tetanus bacilli from horse to human in Toronto. Another considers the marginalization of women in Canada’s animal welfare movement.

The authors collectively push forward from a historiography that features nonhuman animals as objects within human-centered inquiries to a historiography that considers the eclectic contacts, exchanges, and cohabitation of human and nonhuman animals.

With Contributions By: Kristoffer Archibald, Jason Colby, George Colpitts, Joanna Dean, Carla Hustak, Darcy Ingram, Sean Kheraj, William Knight, Sherry Olson, Rachel Poliquin, and Christabelle Sethna

About the Editors:

Joanna Dean is Associate Professor, Department of History, Carleton University

Darcy Ingram is Senior Fellow, Centre on Governance, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ottawa

Christabelle Sethna is Associate Professor, Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa

Table of Contents

 

Introduction

Tables

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Canamalia Urbanis
Darcy Ingram, Christabelle Sthna, and Joanna Dean

1. The Memory of an Elephant: Savagery, Civilization and Spectacle
Christabelle Sethna

2. The Urban Horse and the Shaping of Montreal, 1840–1914
Sherry Olson

3. Wild Things; Taming Canada’s Animal Welfare Movement
Darcy Ingram

4. Fish out of Water: Fish Exhibition in Late Nineteenth–Century Canada
William Knight

5. The Beavers of Stanley Park
Rachel Poliquin

6. Species at Risk: C. Tetani, the Horse and the Human
Joanna Dean

7. Got Milk? Dirty Cows, Unfit Mothers, and Infant Mortality, 1880–1940
Carla Hutak

8. Howl: The 1952-56 Rabies Crisis and the Creation of the Urban Wild at Banff
George Colpitts

9. Arctic Capital: Managing Polar Bears in Churchill, Manitoba
Kristoffer Archibald

10. Cetaceans in the City: Orca Captivity, Animal Rights, and Environmental Values in Vancouver
Jason Colby

Epilogue: Why Animals Matter in Urban History, or Why Cities Matter in Animal History
Sean Kheraj

Contributors

Index

A beautifully written book with a diversity of chapters that can be read as stand-alone papers . . . I readily recommend this book—it offers a mix of easy reading with quality academic research and writing.

—Janette Young, Anthrozoos

Tracing often stunning connections between animals, environments, cultures, and histories, Animal Metropolis explores an extraordinarily diverse set of encounters between humans and other animals in Canadian history. Each chapter was a revelation, offering a timely and provocative look at Canada and its denizens.

—Nigel Rothfels, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Animal Metropolis provides a fascinating taste of what a history that decentres the human might look like. Scholars and students of history, philosophy, sociology, human or critical geography, and animal studies, to name a few, will find chapters that provoke, challenge, and delight.

—Nik Taylor, Associate Professor of Sociology, Flinders University