Epilogue: Why Animals Matter in Urban History, or Why Cities Matter in Animal History
Sean Kheraj
In this collection on urban animals in Canada we see, in part, why animals matter in urban history and why cities matter in animal history. Nonhuman animals, as it turns out, played a significant role in the growth and development of urban environments in Canada and elsewhere around the world. They had the capacity to shape and influence history. Cities, built environments most associated with human endeavour and artificiality, are multi-species habitats. They are home to humans and nonhuman creatures alike. Urban histories attuned to animals open up new ways of thinking about cities and reveal the degree to which cities are hybrid environments, the products of both natural and cultural causation.1 Similarly, animal histories that situate their analyses within the environmental context of cities can expand our understanding of human–animal relations.
What Animals Bring to Urban History
Throughout this collection, we find ample evidence of the ways in which animals shaped Canadian cities. Sherry Olson explicitly traces the impact of the horse on Montreal, perhaps the most consequential domestic animal in urban history. Joanna Dean follows by showing how human relations with urban horses were implicated in the history of tetanus, with subsequent influences on health in Canadian cities. And Carla Hustak explores the ways in which perceptions of risk associated with urban milk supplies and anxieties about race, motherhood, and health prompted the development of elaborate systems of inspection and management of bovine and human bodies. These are just some of the ways in which animals have shaped urban history in Canada.
Olson is convincing in her description of the enduring legacies of such animals as “phantom shadows” that can still be found in the layout of city streets and lots or the narrowness of roads, lanes, and alleys first established at a time before the ascendency of the automobile. They are the vestiges of an urban past when humans and domestic animals cohabited urban environments. Indeed, in many ways, cities were built with domestic animals in mind. Horses, cows, pigs, chickens, and even sheep could be found in some of the largest cities across the country. These animals played critical roles in the development and sustainability of urban environments, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as urban populations exploded in cities like Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver. At a time when nearly all material consumer goods were made with animal and other organic products and when the primary source of energy for urban transportation was the horse (or other draft animals), domestic animals were absolutely vital to the functions of a growing city and central to the lives of ordinary Canadians.
My work focuses on the regulation of domestic animals in nineteenth-century Canadian cities to show the significance of these animals to urban growth and development. Municipal governments devoted much attention to the management and regulation of animals. Some of the first modern bylaws in Canada targeted domestic animals because they were sources of environmental pollution or “nuisance,” obstacles to the movement of traffic, and potential health hazards. The autonomous behaviour of nonhuman animals and the environmental consequences of their bodies compelled municipal governments to develop extensive systems of regulations to control and manage urban environments. These regulations, however, did not seek to entirely exclude domestic animals from cities, at least until the early decades of the twentieth century. As I have argued elsewhere, the management of animals in nineteenth-century Canadian cities was intended to accommodate both human and nonhuman animals.2 Although this accommodation ultimately served human needs and interests, municipal governments still had to consider the protection of the health and the well-being of animals because they were such valuable sources of food and labour. Concerns over domestic animals influenced a wide range of areas of municipal regulation, including public health, street and traffic management, nuisance abatement, garbage removal, public markets, and licensing. Animal management was one of the primary tasks of municipal governments and, to some extent, it shaped the development and expansion of municipal authority in Canada.
The time that municipal governments across the country devoted to thinking about animals and how to regulate their behaviour and their place in cities may seem extraordinary to us now. As early as 1810, the Rules and Regulations of the Police for the City and Suburbs of Montreal set out rudimentary limits on the keeping of animals and the management of their waste. Article 7 regulated the disposal of animal waste or other refuse. It prohibited the dumping of such waste into local rivers, streets, or squares, but it allowed for disposal “into the pond behind the Citadel,” and in the St. Lawrence River during the winter.3 Dead animals were a fact of everyday life in nineteenth-century cities, such that the police in Montreal specifically mandated their removal and burial in these early regulations. Residents were liable and could be fined for failing to remove any dead animal left above ground in any part of the city or in local rivers. In spite of this longstanding rule, dead animals on city streets were a persistent problem. In 1880, the Chief of Police for Montreal first reported statistics on the number of dead animals constables removed from the streets. He documented the removal of 6 sheep, 12 goats, 21 horses, 408 cats, and 718 dogs.4
These rules also attempted to establish control over urban livestock husbandry practices. While it was permissible to raise cattle, horses, pigs, and other domestic animals in nineteenth-century Montreal, the practice of free-range livestock husbandry was restricted. Free-roaming domestic animals were a common nuisance in early Canadian cities. They could obstruct traffic, injure people (and themselves), create health hazards, and cause property damage. Two articles in the 1810 police regulations for Montreal attempted to partially restrain such practices. The regulations forbade the free running of horses, pigs, and goats. They went one measure further when it came to pigs, an animal considered even more troublesome in cities. Article 14 established that “no person shall keep any hogs within the city or suburb so near to any square, street or lane, as to be offensive to the neighbours or passengers.”5 In spite of these restrictions, humans and their animals regularly violated such rules. Cities across the country thus developed pound systems to capture and impound stray cattle, horses, pigs, and many other animals found roaming the streets. In Montreal, the city police were responsible for impounding free-roaming animals. Between 1863 and 1873, the police captured more than 3,000 animals. Horses and cattle were the most common animals police impounded in this decade, while pigs, goats, sheep, and even geese found their way into police custody.6
By the end of the nineteenth century, municipalities continued to permit the keeping of animals in cities, but they placed greater restrictions on urban livestock husbandry. In Toronto, for example, the city council banned all free-range animal husbandry in 1876. The new bylaw amendment prohibited the free roaming of all domestic animals within the city limits. And in 1890, the public health bylaw severely curtailed the keeping of cattle, limiting each household to no more than two cows. While such practices persisted just outside the borders of the city in the periurban environment, such regulations began a process of extirpating livestock from cities.7
Even industries that utilized live animals and animal by-products began to feel the pressure to move out of the city by the early decades of the twentieth century. Take, for instance, Toronto’s eastern neighbourhoods along Danforth Avenue. Prior to the construction of the Prince Edward Viaduct across the Don River Valley in late 1918, the eastern half of the city was largely cut off from the downtown core. As a result, it was sparsely settled and home to a handful of farms and many of Toronto’s so-called noxious industries. Businesses found open air to spew foul smells and local streams and creeks to dispose of waste. It was here that John Harris relocated his family’s animal rendering factory, W. Harris & Co., in 1894 (Fig. 1). Until 1922, this enormous 80-acre facility for the processing of animal waste materials operated at the intersection of Danforth and Coxwell. W. Harris & Co. produced a wide range of products used every day in nineteenth-century Canada, including glues, fertilizers, oils, grease, and tallow. Many of the thousands of bodies of horses, pigs, cows, and other animals that lived and worked in Toronto found their way to W. Harris & Co. on the city’s east side in what we might see to today as a massive recycling facility.8
11.1 Advertisement for W. Harris & Co., 1900. Originally published in the Toronto City Directory, 1900.
The trouble, of course, for the growing city of Toronto was that the Harris family’s “dead horse factory,” as it was sometimes called, made for an undesirable neighbour. The construction of the Prince Edward Viaduct and the eventual extension of street railway service to Danforth and Coxwell opened up new possibilities for suburban development. Property developers subdivided the area around the Harris factory and began to construct new housing even prior to the completion of the viaduct. Before 1918, the factory stood alone surrounded by empty, undeveloped fields, but within a short period of time, it was suddenly subsumed by a fast-growing streetcar suburb (Fig. 11.1).
The new neighbours quickly objected to the Harris factory, finding it less than appealing. Danforth Glebe Estates, one of the nearby development firms, led local residents and other developers in a lawsuit against W. Harris & Co. in 1918, objecting to foul stenches emitted from the factory. One witness at the hearing into the dispute alleged that the air was so bad, “I had to scrape my tongue against my teeth to get the odor off.” The complainants objected to the foul smells and accused the factory of driving away prospective home buyers. In their suit, they called for an injunction against the Harris factory and $200,000 in compensation for damages.9 Within a couple of months, John Harris conceded and agreed to relocate the factory to Ashbridge’s Bay at the mouth of the Don River and subdivide his land for development.10
A few years later, the massive animal rendering facilities were gone, replaced by dozens of detached and semi-detached houses that were connected to the city centre by the extension of electric street railway service to Danforth and Coxwell in 1921. A new residential neighbourhood emerged on the grounds of the former animal by-products factory just as Torontonians began to move away from the use of live domestic animals in the city for transportation and labour. The horse population of Toronto went into decline in the years after 1911, replaced by electric streetcars and automobiles. The history of this small neighbourhood reveals the legacy of that transition in the place of animals in the city. New “horseless” transportation options and the industrialization of dairies and animal slaughter displaced domestic animals from the urban environment in the early decades of the twentieth century. By the 1920s, horses, cows, and pigs were no longer as populous in Toronto as they had been just decades earlier. The residents of this new streetcar suburb on the east side sought further geographic segregation from the sensory evidence of the remaining traces of animals in the city.
These are just some of the many ways that animals shaped urban environments and urban history in Canada. Animals were active agents of change whose behaviours prompted and required various human responses. In fact, humans and animals co-developed cities into hybrid human–animal environments. Although the streets of Canadian cities may no longer be filled with horses and other domestic animals, the influence of nonhuman animal life persists.
What Cities Bring to Animal Studies
In another volume on the history of urban animals, Peter Atkins explores some of the reasons why the study of cities in the twentieth century ignored the role of animals. One reason, he suggests, “is that in the twentieth century the study of cities was anthropocentric, to the extent that the category ‘urban’ acquired a transcendentally humanist quality in which animals played only bit parts, to satisfy our hunger for companionship or for meat.”11 The reverse may be true in animal history. Critical historical scholarship on animals has only recently come to consider the role of cities (and the environment more broadly) in shaping human–animal relations.12 Both humans and nonhuman animals coexist within particular environmental contexts. A web of ecological relationships that include other organisms and inorganic components of an ecosystem shapes the relations of humans and animals. This collection situates the study of human–animal relations within the specific historical and ecological contexts of urban environments in Canada.
Several chapters in this collection highlight the role that cities played in influencing human attitudes toward animals. We see this expressed in the presentation and display of animals in circuses, zoos, museums, and aquariums. This spectacle of animals was, in part, related to urbanization. Crowded populations of humans in cities sought new ways to connect with and think about animals. By the end of the nineteenth century, as Canadian urban centres began to experience their most intense period of population growth, various forms of animal display had become popularized across the country. The city was a place for many species. Zoos, circuses, museums, and aquaria in North America can be seen as products of an urban culture that brought the spectacle of large wild animals to towns and cities across Canada and the United States. Elephants, polar bears, penguins, lions, whales, and numerous other species of so-called exotic wild animals joined a collection of more quotidian creatures, including horses, cows, pigs, chickens, rats, mice, raccoons, and squirrels, telling a rather sad and complicated tale of human–animal relations. Christabelle Sethna finds one such example in the story of the death of Jumbo, a captive zoo and circus elephant. Will Knight shows how the museum became a medium to make fish knowable to urban audiences. And Jason Colby explains the changing relationship between people and cetaceans in Vancouver in the context of the city’s aquarium.13 We also see in Darcy Ingram’s work the ways in which an urban context came to shape the animal welfare movement in Canada.14 In all of these case studies, the city itself is implicated profoundly in the relationship between humans and animals. These authors ably show that to understand human–animal relations, historians must consider the environmental contexts in which those relationships occur and change over time.
We can also see how changing ecological conditions in urban environments had effects on the relationship between people and wild animals, especially those animals that took advantage of the opportunities cities provided for food and shelter. Kristoffer Archibald examines the ways in which an extraordinary wild animal, the polar bear, adapted to and engaged with urban ecosystems in Churchill, Manitoba, while George Colpitts captures a similar dynamic in his analysis of the interactions among domesticated dogs, wild animals, and rabies in western Canada. Throughout urban North America, wild opportunist species found cities to be desirable environments in which to thrive and reproduce. The relationship between people and these wild animals changed over time within the context of such ecological interactions. Like the wild polar bear and the unleashed dog, the ever-adaptable Norway rat, for instance, quickly became the scourge of cities across North America. In Alberta, the provincial government sought to purge the creature from its borders, employing a massive public education and extermination program in the mid-twentieth century.15 In building environments for the mass settlement and congregation of humans, people also inadvertently created suitable habitat for a number of wild animals that adapted to urban conditions. We call these creatures synanthropes: rats, mice, raccoons, seagulls, pigeons, coyotes, and even squirrels.16 They are the unintended consequences of urban development, the products of both natural and cultural causation that illuminate the hybridity of urban environments. The food waste we produce, the nooks and crannies of concrete infrastructure, and the urban heat island effect create conditions for co-evolution and serve as selective agents for particular wild animals that take advantage of these opportunities for food and shelter. As they have thrived under these conditions, their relationship with humans has changed over time.
As Etienne Benson has shown in the case of the urban squirrel in the United States, the emergence of prominent synanthropes in cities was a historical process. “The urbanization of the gray squirrel in the United States between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth century was,” as Benson argues, “an ecological and cultural process that changed the squirrels’ ways of life, altered the urban landscape, and adjusted human understandings of nature, the city, and the boundaries of community.”17 It was the product of culturally induced human labour interacting with the autonomous behaviours of animals. Squirrels appealed to a number of human sensibilities and, thus, people encouraged the growth of squirrel populations, especially in urban parks. In Vancouver, the city park board actively stocked Stanley Park with grey squirrels purchased from a Pennsylvania game company. Over time, squirrels adapted to urban conditions and found ideal shelter and food sources to support a burgeoning population over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, far beyond the purview of human control. In Stanley Park, grey squirrels established a self-sustaining population and cohabited the park with the native Douglas squirrel. In some cities, however, squirrel populations grew so large many people came to view them as undesirable pests rather than attractive urban amenities. Rachel Poliquin confronts similar issues in the case of the beavers in Stanley Park, animals which found the preserved natural spaces of this large urban park to be suitable habitat to construct dams and lodges, often against the wishes of park officials.18
The history of the urban raccoon tells a similar tale.19 Raccoons have long been part of the ecology of Toronto and its region, but they were far less populous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than they are today. In 1913, J.H. Faull’s The Natural History of the Toronto Region described the raccoon as “still not uncommon.” As such, human responses toward raccoons in the early twentieth-century city differed greatly from those in the present. For instance, in the early hours of the morning on 21 May 1895, a playful raccoon escaped from its owner and attracted the attention of “a few hundred people” at the corner of Queen and Berkeley Streets, according to one newspaper account. Scrambling up a telephone pole, the liberated creature entertained the crowd of curious onlookers who stood anxious as a man carefully climbed the pole to recapture the raccoon in a bag, narrowly escaping a treacherous fall. Not only was this animal somebody’s property (possibly a pet), but it was also remarkable enough to hold the interest of a large number of passersby as well as the man who was willing to risk his own safety to retrieve it.20
In Toronto, raccoons were once objects of entertainment, leisure, and fashion. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they drew the attention of tourists who came to see them in the city’s zoos. In 1907 at Riverdale Zoo, park workers built a separate structure just to house the zoo’s raccoon collection. Trappers and ordinary hunters also prized the raccoon. For example, Daniel Mewhort and Thomas Armstrong, two railway workers, caught some media attention during the course of a local raccoon hunting excursion in West Toronto when Thomas accidentally shot Daniel, mistaking him for a raccoon. Local hunting reports also identified parts of North Toronto near the Don River Valley as a place “where ’coons are to be had.” And for many Torontonians, raccoons could always be found at Eaton’s and other department stores where their furs appeared as fashionable luxury goods.21
By the early twenty-first century, the raccoon population of Toronto had exploded, and with the population boom came adjustments to human responses toward the raccoon in the city. The enormous quantities of garbage and compost that Toronto residents produced were just a couple of the ecological conditions that facilitated the raccoon’s adaptation to the city and its emergence as one of Toronto’s predominant synanthropes. Toronto had become so ridden with raccoons that in 2006 local airline company Porter Airlines adopted a cartoon raccoon as its company mascot. As with many other municipalities in North America, the City of Toronto had to develop animal control and urban wildlife policies and programs to manage its raccoons and other wild animals that now thrived in urban environments. Educating the public became a key policy for managing conflicts between people and raccoons in the city.22
The relationship between people and raccoons in Toronto today is fraught and complicated. The animals are so common that they are no longer kept in local zoos and their fur is no longer used to manufacture luxury goods. They have become vermin in the eyes of many Toronto residents. Local media sometimes refer to the conflict between people and raccoons as the “War on Raccoons,”23 indicating the substantial changes that had occurred in the relationship between people and raccoons in Toronto over the course of the twentieth century. While not always at “war,” city residents continue to have an ambivalent relationship with raccoons in Toronto, one that found an odd expression in the form of a makeshift memorial for a dead raccoon nicknamed Conrad at the intersection of Yonge and Church Streets in the summer of 2015.24 That relationship was shaped by the changing ecological conditions of the urban environment. As the city grew, people inadvertently created ample food and shelter for a burgeoning raccoon population. In the eyes of many Toronto residents, the raccoon transformed from a creature of entertainment, leisure, and luxury into a pest that is openly hated or admired grudgingly for its clever adaptability to the urban landscape. The process of that transformation cannot be understood outside of the broader ecological transformations of the urban environment of Toronto.
As this collection makes evident, urban history and animal history have much to offer each other. By thinking about animals in urban environments, we can find richer histories about the places that humans share with other creatures, the ones we exploit, the ones we admire, the ones we loathe, and the ones we ignore. Humans and nonhuman animals are, however, but two actors in an ecological relationship that includes many other organic and inorganic actors. I would like to suggest that this collection offers a compelling case for historians to situate humans and animals within the broader ecological contexts in which their interactions transpire and within the complex web of relationships that constitute an ecosystem. The field of animal history, which seeks to explore human–animal relations, does so in a limited manner when it excludes environmental considerations. This is where environmental history can expand scholarship in animal history. By examining human–animal relations within the urban context, this collection casts light on those broader ecological relationships and sets new directions for the field of animal history. This collection points toward the need for historians to emphasize that relations of humans and animals are shaped by a web of ecological relationships that include other organisms and inorganic components of an ecosystem.
New Directions in Urban History and Animal History
In bridging urban history and animal history, this collection sets forth new avenues for research in both fields of study. The essays in this collection clearly show how scholars can expand our understanding of urban development and change over time by moving beyond an exclusively anthropocentric perspective of cities. Humans and animals both played significant parts in urbanization, creating multi-species environments. There continues to be a need for further research in this area. While horses, cattle, pigs, and chickens were populous and influential in urban development, how did these animals interact within growing cities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? What effects did their interactions have on urban planning and the development of regulation and infrastructure? How did federal and provincial authorities interact with municipal governments in the regulation of animals in Canadian cities? How did municipal governments go about extirpating livestock husbandry from within their boundaries? What effects did this have on their regional hinterlands? What were the regional differences in approaches to dealing with urban animals across Canada from the Atlantic provinces to central Canada to the prairies and the Pacific coast? How did towns and cities confront animals in northern environments of the Subarctic and Arctic?
The history of animal diseases, especially zoonotic diseases (those which can pass from animals to humans), is another area that can expand scholarship in urban and animal history. As Dean, Hustak, and Colpitts show, tetanus, bovine tuberculosis, and rabies are just three examples of zoonotic diseases that emerged within the context of urban environments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with consequences for the development of public health. Research might also explore other diseases, such as equine influenza, glanders, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, to see what other ways animal diseases may have influenced the development of public health policy in urban centres in Canada.
Archibald’s polar bears and Colpitts’ coyotes, wolves, and foxes reveal the tantalizing possibilities for further explorations of synanthropes in urban and animal history. Pigeons, seagulls, rats, squirrels, and raccoons are some of the most populous urban animals in Canada today, yet their histories have gone relatively unexplored. Canadian historians have devoted more attention to charismatic wildlife species, such as bison, caribou, deer, and moose. Given the daily experiences of so many millions of Canadians with urban animals, the interactions of humans and synanthropes will likely yield important new insights into human–animals relations. Given that the most common domestic animals in Canadian urban environments today are pets (mostly cats and dogs), historians also need to look at the environmental histories of pet keeping in Canada. This too would highlight important aspects of the most common daily interactions of people and animals.
Further research is needed in Canadian urban history on the place of Indian reserves and First Nations people in urban development. Here too we may find new insights into the historical relationships between humans and nonhuman animals. Some of Canada’s largest urban environments developed adjacent to (and eventually encircled) large Indian reserves. In Vancouver, for instance, the federal government established reserves at Musqueam, Kitsilano, and Homulchesan (Capilano), now located in the most urbanized environments of western Canada. In the late nineteenth century, Squamish people living at Homulchesan began to raise introduced livestock animals, including horses and cattle, to serve the growing lumbering operations on Burrard Inlet. This is just one example of the complex relationships among Indigenous people, livestock animals, and emerging urban environments.
Finally, the essays in this collection point to new possibilities for research on the spectacle of animals in urban environments. Colby’s analysis of cetaceans in the Vancouver Aquarium, Knight’s look at the national fish museum, and Sethna’s sad tale of Jumbo all speak to the ways in which animals in captivity have had a long and complicated urban history. Nearly all of the major metropolitan centres in Canada have hosted large zoos with diverse populations of exotic species, from toucans in Toronto to penguins in Vancouver and giraffes in Calgary. The display of zoo animals in Canadian cities was part of an international phenomenon of urban spectacle dating back to the late decades of the eighteenth century. What form this spectacle took in Canada and how it changed over time in response to both local demands and international influences has yet to be examined in a sustained historical study.
This collection generates new questions about human–animal relations within the context of urban environments. This should inspire new research and result in expanded knowledge of the complicated ways in which the ecological interactions among humans, animals, and environments have been shaped by mutually constitutive forces of natural and cultural change over time.
Notes
1 I draw from the arguments of Richard C. Hoffmann and his use of the interaction model from the school of social ecology in Vienna. This is outlined in the introduction to An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–20. Hoffmann’s model for environmental history provides scholars with a means to avoid what Martin Melosi calls “the nature/built environment nexus,” a belief that there are two separate environments, one natural and the other artificial. Instead, both Melosi and Hoffmann call upon environmental historians to think about nature and culture as mutually constitutive (but autonomous) realms. See Martin Melosi, “Humans, Cities, and Nature: How Do Cities Fit in the Material World,” Journal of Urban History 36, no. 1 (2010): 3–21.
2 See Sean Kheraj, “Living and Working with Domestic Animals in Nineteenth-Century Toronto,” in Urban Explorations: Environmental Histories of the Toronto Region, ed. L. Anders Sandberg, Stephen Bocking, Colin Coates, and Ken Cruikshank (Hamilton, ON: L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History, 2013), 120–40, and Sean Kheraj, “Animals and Urban Environments: Managing Domestic Animals in Nineteenth-Century Winnipeg,” in Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History, ed. James Beattie, Edward Melillo, and Emily O’Gorman (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 263–88.
3 Rules and Regulations of Police for the City and Suburbs of Montreal (Montreal: 1810), 14–16.
4 Annual Report of the Chief of Police for the Year 1880 (Montreal: 1881), 14.
5 Rules and Regulations of Police for the City and Suburbs of Montreal (Montreal: 1810), 14.
6 See Annual Report of the Chief of Police for the years 1863 to 1873.
7 By-law 474, “A By-law to provide for the appointment of Pound-keepers, and to regulate the Pounds in the City of Toronto,” 25 September 1876; By-law 2477, “A By-Law relating to the Local Board of Health,” 13 January 1890, By-Laws of the City of Toronto, 1834 to 1890 (Toronto: Roswell & Hutchison, 1890).
8 Barbara Myrvold, The Danforth in Pictures: A Brief History of the Danforth (Toronto: Toronto Public Libraries, 1979), 16.
9 “Could ‘Scrape’ Off Smell,” Toronto Daily Star, 27 March 1918, 5.
10 “Dispense with Odors by Utilizing Residue,” Toronto Daily Star, 19 July 1918, 4.
11 Peter Atkins, “Introduction,” in Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories, ed. Peter Atkins (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 2.
12 Several recent publications in urban environmental history demonstrate a new focus on the role of cities in historical animal studies. See, for instance, Jennifer Mason, Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
13 I have written about similar issues and the ways in which urban experiences with animals can shape perceptions of wildlife in Sean Kheraj, “Demonstration Wildlife: Negotiating the Animal Landscape of Vancouver’s Stanley Park, 1888–1996,” Environment and History 18, no. 4 (2012): 497–527.
14 For more on Ingram’s work see Darcy Ingram, “Beastly Measures: Animal Welfare, Civil Society, and State Policy in Victorian Canada,” Journal of Canadian Studies 47, no. 1 (2013): 221–52.
15 See Lianne McTavish and Jingjing Zheng, “Rats in Alberta: Looking at Pest-Control Posters from the 1950s,” Canadian Historical Review 92, no. 3 (2011): 515–46.
16 Dawn Day Biehler explores the history of urban synanthropes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America in Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013).
17 Etienne Benson, “The Urbanization of the Eastern Gray Squirrel in the United States,” Journal of American History 100, no. 3 (2013): 692.
18 Sean Kheraj, Inventing Stanley Park: An Environmental History (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 129.
19 See Lauren Corman, “Getting Their Hands Dirty: Raccoons, Freegans, and Urban ‘Trash’,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 9, no. 3 (2011): 28–61.
20 J.H. Faull, The Natural History of the Toronto Region (Toronto: Canadian Institute, 1913), 210; “A New Coon in Town,” Toronto Daily Star, 21 May 1895, 4.
21 “Coons for the Zoo,” Toronto Daily Star, 28 September 1903, 1; “At Riverdale Park,” Toronto Daily Star, 22 August 1907, 7; “Man Mistaken for a Coon,” Toronto Daily Star, 1 September 1908, 1, 3; “Trappers in Ontario,” Toronto Daily Star, 10 February 1906, 21.
22 “Introducing Mr. Porter,” Porter Airlines, https://www.flyporter.com/about/News-Release-Details?id=ae2c07e5-0675-4e0f-8b59-f559c3b679f1&culture=en-CA (accessed 31 July 2015).
23 “Man Charged after Raccoons Attacked,” Toronto Star, 2 June 2011, A1.
24 “#DeadRaccoonTO Honoured By Toronto with Sidewalk Vigil,” CBC News, http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/deadraccoonto-honoured-by-toronto-with-sidewalk-vigil-1.3146036 (accessed 20 October 2015).