Introduction: Canamalia Urbanis
Darcy Ingram, Christabelle Sethna,
and Joanna Dean
Beaver. Moose. Caribou. Think “animal” in Canada, and these and other iconic creatures of the Canadian wilderness are sure to come first to mind. Yet Canada has become increasingly urban since Confederation, to the extent that more than 80 per cent of the population today is considered to live in an urban setting.1 That urban identity has shaped profoundly the material and cultural contexts of human/nonhuman animal relations. Emblematic megafauna aside, urban Canadians are far more likely to encounter in their daily lives anything from dogs and cats to deer, squirrels, raccoons, sparrows, foxes, rabbits, skunks, pigeons, mice, cockroaches, crows, and coyotes, not to mention the many species encountered primarily in the form of consumer goods. It is to that dimension of the urban experience, in all its barking, mooing, neighing, chirping, chewing, digging, foraging, performing, and more perfunctory forms, that we turn.
The essays in this collection explore the intersection of a variety of human and nonhuman animals as they negotiate their way in Canada’s urban spaces. They bring together a diverse range of perspectives, including but not limited to insights derived from animal, environmental, cultural, critical animal, posthumanist, and species studies; social analyses of class, race, and gender; and the colonial and imperial contexts of human–animal relations. Balancing this diversity is their common appreciation of the temporal dimensions of that relationship. In its own way, each essay contributes to the topic a sense of historical contingency derived from a wide range of methodological innovations, empirical sources, and ethical considerations. In doing so, they collectively push forward from a historiography that features nonhuman animals largely as objects within human-centred inquiries to one that considers at various levels of complexity their eclectic contacts, exchanges, and cohabitation with human animals. In the process, the essays underscore the blurry nature of the spatial boundaries – urban, rural, wilderness – so often employed as interpretive frameworks for human–animal interaction. In short, they indicate clearly the impact of Canada’s urban identity on how Canadians think about and experience their nonhuman counterparts, and in turn on the many animals that live in, move through, or otherwise encounter urban Canada.
One might still be inclined to ask: Do we need a collection on the history of human–animal relations devoted specifically to urban Canada? It is a good question, and one that is best answered with its counterpart in mind: Given Canada’s longstanding urban identity and the degree to which the question of the urban animal looms large in so many other contexts, why don’t we already have one? We will respond by concentrating on three interrelated topics: the evolution of what is now referred to as the “animal turn” in the humanities and social sciences; the peculiar trajectory of Canadian historiography relative to nonhuman animals; and finally the support that Canadian history offers with regard to the evolving human–animal nexus – in other words, why the history of urban animals in Canada matters.
Taking Stock of the Animal Turn
In many ways, the animal turn is something of a return. Indeed, phrases such as taking “stock” (a word long linked to domesticated animals or “livestock”), or for that matter a term so central as “capital” (also long associated with agricultural animals including cattle, forms of mobile property or “chattel” that were traded on the “stock exchange”) in the world today are among the many animal metaphors that fill our daily lives. The ghostly animal presence that lingers in so much of our language is but one indication that, as Claude Levi-Strauss observed, nonhuman animals have long been central to how we human animals think about ourselves and the world around us.2 Urbanization, industrialization, the rise of science and technology, human population growth, and other developments associated with the course of modernity over the past few centuries have by no means severed those links. But that package has changed the ways in which human animals think about and treat nonhuman animals. In 1977, John Berger wrote a foundational essay entitled “Why Look at Animals?” in which he argues that the past two centuries witnessed a process “by which every tradition which has previously mediated between man [sic] and nature was broken.” The nonhuman animal, whose life had run parallel to that of the human, had disappeared in the nineteenth century only to be replaced by a proliferation of empty simulacra: animal imagery, animal toys, dependent pets, and, most tellingly, the zoo. Berger mourned: “Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.” Most significantly, nonhuman animals no longer return our gaze: “the look between animal and man . . . has been extinguished.”3 Berger’s essay spoke to a generation’s alienation from capitalist modernity. His sense of despair at the loss of profound human–animal connections has resonated in the decades since, reaching a wide public audience and providing inspiration for a divergent literature. In one echo of those sentiments, Akira Lippit describes technological representation as a “vast mausoleum for animal being.”4 Support for Berger’s argument can be found in the underlying emptiness of representations of nonhuman animals that have appeared in many major urban settings, from street art such as the sculptures of cows in Calgary and the moose of Toronto to Louise Bourgeois’s magnificent egg-filled spider “Maman” that towers over tourists in all its high art Freudian glory at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.5 The explosion in animal representations is even embodied in totemic fashion by one particular species of human animal – the urban hipster – whose earrings, t-shirts, sweatshirts, stockings, bags, and brooches routinely feature animal imagery.
But Berger’s nostalgia for a pre-industrial past has come under criticism on a number of grounds. Historians have demonstrated that the nineteenth-century city was, in fact, teeming with animal life. As Hilda Kean points out, rather than disappearing from the everyday, “animals continued to play significant roles in the domestic life of city dwellers both as objects of affection and as the mainstay of the transportation system.”6 We might be better to accept, as does Scott Miltenberger referring to nineteenth-century New York, that cities are “anthrozootic” because they are “defined and made by interspecies relationships.”7 Many of these urban animals were not holdovers from a traditional past; they were creatures remade for industrial capitalism. The heavy draft horse was a “living machine.” Harnessed to the efficiencies of the streetcar and the inflexible might of the iron horse, its muscular animal body was shaped by the human need for power.8 Jason Hribal identifies these animals as members of the industrial working class, simultaneously powering the capitalist machine while resisting its oppression.9 The urban equine population peaked in the late nineteenth century, with horses urbanizing even faster than humans did. Contra Berger, nonhuman animals did not disappear with modernity. Rather, they played a key role in shaping the city in the nineteenth century, and many animals remained in the city well into the twentieth century.
Nor was the animal image always an empty simulacrum. In a critical reading of Berger’s essay, film historian Jonathan Burt points out that although the real animal continues to live and suffer in modernity, the animal image has been transformational in moving humans to mitigate that suffering.10 Writing shortly after Berger, historians James Turner and Keith Thomas interpreted the radical shift in our relations with the natural and animal worlds at the beginning of the nineteenth century very differently. They observed growing emotional engagement with the nonhuman animal and the rise of animal welfare movements. Soon after, Coral Lansbury and Kathleen Kete fleshed out the class and gender dimensions of this transition with their histories of antivivisection movements in London and Paris.11 And in her important work, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, Harriet Ritvo allowed for the central place of animals in the British imaginary.12 These historians demonstrated that not only were nonhuman animals continuing to live in the city but they also continued to live in meaningful ways in the minds of humans.13
Since then, a growing literature on the animal turn has begun to chart the place of animals in modernity. In fields ranging from law, geography, philosophy, science, environmental studies, anthropology, and bioethics to linguistics, literary criticism, ecofeminism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies, and in areas of animal studies devoted specifically to the subject, we see ongoing efforts to grapple with the complexities of human–animal relations. Journals like Anthrozoos, Society and Animals, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, the listserv H-Animal, and book series such as Harriet Ritvo’s “Animals, History, Culture,” and Nigel Rothfels’s “Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures,” have provided a multidisciplinary forum for scholars. Among the Canadian scholars to participate in these developments, Robert Preece, in Animals and Nature: Cultural Myths, Cultural Realities, debunks the notion that Western approaches to nonhuman animals are pejorative, claiming that they are complex and wide-ranging historically. Janice Fiamengo’s important collection, Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination, delves into themes such as the barrier between humans and animals, animals as metaphors, and the ethical treatment of animals. Nicole Shukin provides a sharp critique of global capitalism by insisting that “the discourses and technologies of biopower hinge on the species divide,” which she observes in the “rendering” of animals, in the double meaning of their representation and their slaughter. The provocative Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, encourages us to interrogate the many gendered, raced, classed, and sexualized meanings of “nature” in order to queer natural environments and their human and nonhuman animal populations and communities.14 From this perspective, some scholars have moved to challenge transphobic and heteronormative narratives, as in Myra Hird and Christabelle Sethna’s work on transspecies organisms and sex education pedagogies, respectively.15 To follow the pertinent observations of Julie Livingston and Jasbir K. Puar, “studies of mutually constituted, co-emergent, cohabitative interspecies encounters, riddled with hierarchies of power and the complexity of incommensurate ontologies,” are “all the rage.”16
Animal studies can be conceived in terms of two intersecting strands. One strand of thought converges on the cultural power of the visual or symbolic animal and probes the boundaries between human and nonhuman species, destabilizing notions of human exceptionalism. Here, scholars of various perspectives have turned to contemplate the complexities of human identity, the paradoxes of modernity, and questions of power relations. Donna Haraway highlights the breakdown and inchoate merger by the late twentieth century of formerly assured categories human/animal/technology and the political implications that lie therein.17 This posthumanist approach points toward an acceptance of multiplicity, liminality, ambiguity, and hybridity. Cary Wolfe observes that posthumanism represents not so much anti-humanism as an opportunity “to rethink our taken-for-granted modes of human experience, including the normal perceptual modes and affective states of Homo sapiens itself, by recontextualizing them in terms of the entire sensorium of other living beings.”18 Rosi Braidotti’s contribution is the “bioegalitarian turn,” which advocates that we relate to animals as animals ourselves, a practice that “spells the end of the familiar, asymmetrical relation to animals, which was saturated with fantasies, emotions, and desires and framed by power relations.”19 The venerable Jacques Derrida has also intervened, asking perplexing questions about his human self-identity when gazed upon by his cat.20 As Kari Weil summarizes: “It has become clear that the idea of ‘the animal’ – instinctive beings with presumably no access to language, texts, or abstract thinking – has functioned as an unexamined foundation on which the idea of the human and hence the humanities have been built. It has also become clear, primarily through advances in a range of scientific studies of animal language, culture, and morality, that this exclusion has taken place on false grounds.”21
A second strand emphasizes the sentient animal, with its susceptibility to pain, and raises ethical and political concerns about the human treatment of nonhuman animals. Drawing on the work of philosophers Peter Singer and Tom Regan, this strand encourages a political response to animal suffering. Published in 1975, Singer’s Animal Liberation embedded ethics regarding nonhuman animals in the language and politics of the late 1960s and the 1970s via its discussion of speciesism. Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights further advanced that movement’s philosophical framework in both intellectual and activist circles, giving it a critical and in some cases radical edge with regard to the challenges it posed to mainstream attitudes and practices.22 Later, Martha Nussbaum suggested that a “capabilities approach” is an appropriate basis for animal rights, a position with which Singer disagrees.23 One wing of activist academics, loosely gathered under the name Critical Animal Studies, has taken aim at the intellectual abstractions of animal studies scholars who, in their eyes, further exploit the nonhuman. John Sorenson’s recent collection Critical Animal Studies: Thinking the Unthinkable calls for a more politically engaged response to animal suffering. Particularly interesting here is the chapter by David Nibert, which links, in the tradition of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, today’s urban slaughterhouses to the abuse of animals, women, and poor immigrants.24 In the same volume, Carol J. Adams decries the war on compassion. Like other ecofeminists who support vegetarianism or veganism, she proposes that the suffering of nonhuman animals reflects the androcentric domination of nature and is related to men’s sexual oppression of women. She calls elsewhere for a feminist tradition of care, rather than a rights-based position on animal cruelty.25
These developments have been informed by parallel shifts in the sciences, most obviously with regard to the study of animals, but also in response to the ethical questions raised by humans’ growing technological capacities. Well-entrenched beliefs about what it means to be human have likewise been disturbed, and considerable effort has gone into undermining the status of the individual white, adult, male human as the yardstick by which the living world is measured – a unit that has long been central to the humanist ethos. Biologists in particular have brought through their studies of nonhuman animals – initially primates, then cetaceans and elephants – a growing recognition that boundaries separating human and nonhuman animals were artificial constructions. At the same time, developments in areas ranging from medicine to artificial intelligence have challenged what it means to be human, and indeed what it means to be an animal of any sort. Convinced by initiatives including those of Peter Singer, Paola Cavalieri, and the Great Ape Project, various governments have even moved in the direction of conferring basic legal rights on nonhuman hominids because of their many similarities to humans (of course, privileging those animals bearing the closest resemblance to humans is perhaps simply an extension of humanism).26
Some of the most interesting endeavours in animal studies go beyond the recognition of the almost-human, rational, agentic, and sentient animal to a consideration of formations, networks, and assemblages. Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT), especially in the hands of geographers Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, provides a way of understanding action to be agential, networked, and inclusive of nonhuman animals.27 ANT, however, grants agency not only to fully sentient beings but also to less sentient beings such as bacteria as well as to objects such as microscopes. In David Gary Shaw’s application of ANT to cavalry, the stirrup and the bit are as much a part of the network as the horse, or the rider.28 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri destabilize liberal notions of human agency and subjecthood, but their approach offers the more richly metaphorical concepts of assemblage, entanglement and becoming-animal.29
Historians have been slow to join this discussion, but they are well positioned to further it within animal studies, especially with regard to the critical question of agency in nonhuman animals.30 Contributors to the 2013 animal issue of History and Theory found agency to be a unifying thread; Vinciane Despret draws mainly upon Deleuzian assemblage, or as she prefers, agencement, to move that individuals (animals, humans, and even plants) become companion-agents, just as Chris Pearson describes militarized dogs as agents working in alliance with humans.31 Their work gives historical substance to Donna Haraway’s notion of intra active becoming.32 In fact, the extension of agency to other species, and the inclusion of a much more diverse set of actors, may have repercussions for the practice of history, as when humans move from centre stage when whales shape our actions, or when wolves and lions consume us, rather than we them.33 Observing change over time also provides evidence for agential action, and historical records provide evidence for the transmission of something we might call culture within communities and across generations of nonhuman animals. In the same issue, Mahesh Rangarajan suggests that the history of India’s Gir Forest lions is evidence of cultural memory because their behaviour around humans suggests lessons learned and passed on from one generation of lions to the next. Jon Coleman makes a similar case for North American wolves, and Ryan Tucker Jones contends that whales in the North Pacific have been co-crafters of human history.34 Historians have also contributed to discussions of the agency of individual animals, especially working animals: Eric Baratay’s horses, Jason Hribal’s circus animals, and Erica Fudge’s dairy cows resist, and through their resistance they demonstrate their own subjectivity, will, and interests.35
Urban Animals and the Development of Canadian Historiography
In the last decade or so there has been a veritable flood of international literature on the urban history of the nonhuman animal. Scholars such as Nigel Rothfels, Louise Robbins, Susan Nance, Takashi Ito, and Katherine C. Grier consider animal as spectacle in urban zoos and circuses, and in so doing have tracked the sale and display of animals considered exotic along circuits of imperial power in which cities figured as hubs of transnational exchanges.36 Peter Atkins’s collection Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories puts forward contributions on cities including London, Paris, Edinburgh, and Melbourne. Philip Howells similarly deals with dog stealing in London, and Hannah Velten re-animalizes the same city in her Beastly London: A History of Animals in the City. Catherine McNeur asks readers to tour nineteenth-century New York, a city teeming with horse manure, livestock waste, offal, and garbage, all of which delighted the roaming pigs, which lower-class Irish and German immigrants and African Americans treasured as a food source. There, attempts to sweep pigs off the street in a misguided attempt to corral a cholera epidemic led to battles between city police and poor women responsible for pig keeping. Andrea Gaynor studies the regulation of chickens in Australian suburbia, while Alice Hovorka reminds us that chickens continue to outnumber people in African cities like Gaborone.37 Some of the most intriguing investigations are of nonhuman animals that inhabit urban spaces via their own agency, among them a wide variety of birds and mammals, along with larger species that routinely roam the urban periphery, including deer, coyotes, and in some cases bears and cougars. Karen Brown’s research on rabies in southern Africa reminds us of the intimacies of human and canine bodies in impoverished urban settings. Etienne Benson tracks the urbanization of the gray squirrel in North America.38 Dawn Biehler’s Pests in the City describes the urban ecologies that supported the proliferation of flies, bedbugs, cockroaches, and rats, and a 2015 special issue of Environment and History presents a similar focus on “creepy crawlies.” In yet another instance, a collection on “trash species” edited by Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnson II explores why humans designate certain nonhuman animals as offensive, useless, or unworthy urban co-habitants.39
By contrast, nonhuman animals, urban or otherwise, have not received the kind of critical attention in Canadian historical circles that they have in other contexts since the 1970s. This omission is startling because at the most elementary level animals have played a considerable role in determining the location of many settlements of both Indigenous and European origin. “Ottawa,” Canada’s capital, is derived from an Algonquin term associated with the fur trade, while “Toronto” is most likely a Mohawk reference to weirs used to catch fish.40 In similar fashion, nonhuman animal names are stamped on towns and cities across the country, from Moose Jaw to Whitehorse to Rivière-du-Loup. Conversely, Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne’s much-loved children’s storybook bear, was inspired by First World War Canadian Lt. Harry Colebourn’s purchase of a cub he named after his hometown of Winnipeg.41 Even Canadian urban history itself has yet to consider seriously the nonhuman animal as urban resident. This field tends more toward the inert entities of landscape and water, and to corresponding movements for planning and sanitation.42 Yet a majority of households in the country now shelter a pet that serves many familial roles, including as a facilitator of human-to-human relationships in urban spaces like dog parks. Moreover, evidence of a burgeoning “pet economy” fuelled by the commodification of “dominance-affection-love” relations between humans and their companion animals is everywhere in cities, from pet clothing boutiques to grooming services to veterinary clinics to no-kill shelters.43
Ironically, the relative scarcity of animals in Canadian historical analyses of the past four decades is perhaps best understood as a response to a curious historiography in which animals were for a long time abundant. Consider, for example, the basics – the kind of stuff that makes it into introductory textbooks on Canadian history. Be it in the context of furs, fish, or farms, the relationship of nonhuman animals to Indigenous peoples and European colonizers has long been central to Canada’s national metanarrative – so much so that when Harold Innis set out in the 1930s to write his now-classic economic analysis The Fur Trade in Canada, he decided to devote his first chapter to the beaver. “It is impossible,” he insisted in that book’s first paragraph, “to understand the characteristic developments of the trade or of Canadian history without some knowledge of its life and habits.”44 That text soon joined other economic analyses of Canadian staples, many of which also happened to be animals, whether the species that comprise the nation’s fisheries, the cattle and other livestock that underpinned economic growth in the continent’s interior, or the bison that were pushed to the point of extinction. Popular history too was replete with animals. From wolves to bears to mosquitoes, wildlife figured frequently in often-romanticized historical narratives of life, war, travel, and adventure in colonial North America. Underlying this narrative was the terra nullius ideology of white settlers that set the stage for the physical, biological, and cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples and paved the way for the development of Euro-North American colonial cities with their racialized spatial configurations, reducing the Indigenous to the status of the savage and the animal.45
Within academic circles, economic history gave way to political history during the 1950s, but the two perspectives overlapped considerably, and it was not until the 1960s, and really the 1970s, that there appeared some profound challenges to this trajectory. Informed by the rise of movements for social justice manifest in social, labour, women’s, and urban history, the subsequent generation of Canadian historians began to diverge considerably from their predecessors. In their efforts to address Canada’s past in ways that brought forward marginalized voices while emphasizing agency and contingency, they levelled many important challenges. At the same time, however, they abandoned many seemingly cliché topics from the past – one of which was animals, which had for so long been connected in academic circles to economic history and to what was now being labelled scathingly as geographical determinism. In this way, the process of politicizing history from below went only so far. The accompanying geographical shift away from the rural and frontier world in favour of urban and industrial analyses that fitted so well with contemporary historical analysis in the United States and Europe pushed animals even further outside the scope of Canadian historiography. As a result, animals were left behind as nationalist, historical, literary, and emblematic clichés.
The first concerted efforts to bring animals back into Canadian history came from environmental historians. Ironically, for a nation in which the environment figures so prominently, environmental history itself took a long time to develop, hampered as it was by the same reluctance to engage critically in a topic that was so heavily associated with prominent figures like Harold Innis, Arthur Lower, and Donald Creighton, and that fitted so poorly with the theories and frameworks of a discipline that had in other respects become increasingly diverse in its efforts to tackle everything from race, ethnicity, and gender to culture, postcolonialism, and power. That began to change in the 1990s with the publication of a growing number of environment-oriented studies that dealt wholly or in part with animals. Inspired by a well-developed environmental historiography in the United States, Canadian historiography caught up quickly, and wildlife in particular now figures prominently in the work of environmental historians including Bill Parenteau, Tina Loo, John Sandlos, George Colpitts, Darin Kinsey, Darcy Ingram, and Neil S. Forkey.46 In the process, environmental historians established links to anthropologists, with whom they and other Canadian historians already shared common interest in the experiences of Aboriginal peoples. A focus on Indigenous scientific knowledge has charted alternative ways of understanding the natural world, with the potential to destabilize more dominant assumptions about animal agency and sentience.47 They also found common ground with historical geographers, many of whom have long been attuned to the kind of spatial issues with which environmental historians were grappling. Mindful to varying degrees of the urban, most of this work nevertheless takes as its immediate focus issues associated more closely with the bread and butter of environmental history, for which Canada offers no end of opportunities – namely wildlife, wilderness, parks, conservation, preservation, and resource development and management. Discussions of animal sentience, subjectivity, or agency are seldom addressed, and concepts such as animal network theory, assemblage, or posthumanism are even more rare. In this way, environmental history too has only just begun to address the animal turn and with it the place of urban animals in Canadian history.48
Why the History of Urban Animals in Canada Matters
The laggard pace at which this kind of scholarship moves in Canada is at odds with the voracious appetite for tales about urban nonhuman animals as evidenced in traditional and social media. The Toronto Star marked the end of 2015 with a year’s worth of “quirky animal stories” that ranged from the opening of the city’s first cat café to the birth of panda cubs at the zoo to a runaway peacock called Henley. Each story contained embedded links to photos and footage that came primarily from ordinary individuals who are able increasingly to capture urban wildlife in action with pocket-sized audiovisual technology and post their observations rapidly to the internet.49 This high level of interest may or may not support the thesis that we experience “nature deficit disorder,” meaning human alienation from direct contact with natural world.50 Direct contact has its joys and sorrows. A feel-good newspaper article about the sighting of an Arctic snowy owl perched on a neighbour’s roof in the city of Niagara Falls, a live camera feed of hibernating grizzly bears in Vancouver’s Grouse Mountain, or a special hashtag for a photo of a red fox napping inside an Ottawa public bus that circulates in the twittersphere, are often trumped by deadly outcomes for both animals and humans.51 At one end of the spectrum, a Toronto man is convicted for bashing three baby raccoons with a shovel because they were apparently destroying his garden. At the other, a woman is sentenced to jail for stopping her car on a busy highway south of Montreal to assist a family of ducklings, resulting in the death of two people who crashed into her vehicle.52
These examples point to the complexities of urban interspecies coexistence and to the difficulties of distinguishing the urban from the suburban, the rural, and the wild in the context of sprawling cities, reforestation, and wildlife protection. Clearly, as Annabelle Sabloff’s important ethnographic study of animal–human encounters in Toronto reminds us, cities do not stand apart from nature. In fact, the city and its environs “teem with animal and vegetable presence” in parks, conservation areas, hiking trails, ravines, gardens, petting zoos, pet cemeteries, animal sanctuaries, and game farms.53 Herein the nonhuman may have a clear advantage over the human. A host of studies have shown that various creatures living in urban and periurban areas have “colonized” these spaces in large numbers and in great concentrations by modifying or adapting their behaviours. Thanks to this process of “synurbanization,” some species become nocturnal hunters, some breed earlier, and some vocalize at louder pitches.54
In acknowledgement of what the city and nature can offer each other, the Museum of Vancouver held an exhibit in 2014 entitled “Re-Wilding the City.” The exhibit reinforced the notion that while defining nature is an impossible task, demarcating the urban in a Canadian context is not a simple matter either. From 1971 to 2011 Statistics Canada identified an urban area as having a population of at least 1,000 and a density of 400 or more people per square kilometre. Anything outside that was considered rural.55 This definition excludes a northern centre as important as Churchill, Manitoba. Moreover, small centres can be urban in their consequences for animal–human relations. The 1960s relocation of Indigenous people in the north into settlements is a case in point. The relocation disrupted long-established relationships between the Inuit and sled dogs. Dogs had been essential draft animals and companions to Inuit hunters for 800 years, but with the appearance of the snowmobile, dogs were no longer essential, and in the close quarters of the settlements, unchained dogs became a menace to children. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police killed hundreds of these dogs. The experience came to stand for all that the Inuit had lost in modernity.56 The relationship of dog and Inuit in the consolidated settlements was an urban one, in which the dog became a leashed dependent rather than a partner in the hunt.
For the purposes of this collection, the urban may be defined broadly to encompass the ways human and nonhuman animals coexist in industrial modernity, rather than simply in terms of human population density and spatial geographical boundaries. Significantly, cultural geographers have insisted over the last two decades upon a “transspecies urban theory” in order to account for the impact of cities on the natural environment, the interaction of human and nonhuman animals, and wildlife ecology.57 In ways that echo many of Berger’s sentiments, Jennifer Wolch calls for a “Zoöpolis” that is predicated upon our ability “to renaturalize cities and invite the animals back in – and in the process re-enchant the city.”58 In similar fashion, Chris Philo proposes that the nonhuman animal has been subjected to “human chauvinism.” He suggests that “animals should be seen as enmeshed in complex power relations with human communities, and in the process enduring geographies which are imposed upon them ‘from without’ but which they may also inadvertently influence ‘from within.’”59 Finally, one can glean much in this regard from William Cronon’s lauded Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, which reminds us that the city is embedded in the country, and functions by virtue of its connections with the natural world around it. Arguing that “a rural landscape which omits the city and an urban landscape which omits the country are radically incomplete as portraits of their shared world,” Cronon brings the smells and noise of pigs into the heart of Chicago.60
A considerable amount of Canadian urban historiography has long been concerned with metropolitanism in ways comparable to that of Cronon, most notably in the metropole-hinterland approach associated with historians such as Harold Innis and given further purchase through J.M.S. Careless.61 Through such perspectives Canadian urban history is, unsurprisingly, one of nodes, networks, and communication lines flung across vast distances, connecting metropolitan centres in patterns that only sometimes responded to the lay of the land. Animals were pulled along these lines, as beaver, cod, and later beef and hogs, were shipped to the metropole, in turn shaping cities in their passage. During the 1970s and 1980s, social historians contributed new perspectives on animals as they scrutinized the fabric of the everyday urban and industrial life. In “Pigs, Cows and Boarders: Non-Wage Forms of Survival Among Montreal Families, 1861–91,” Bettina Bradbury notes the economic importance of domesticated animals to working-class families in that city and the impacts of an evolving regulatory context that saw such animals pushed out of the city for reasons including health, sanitation, public order, aesthetics, and propriety. Margaret Heap similarly underscores the centrality of horses in Montreal in her review of the impact of the carter’s strike of 1864, while Peter DeLottinville’s account of Montreal’s Charles McKiernan, better known as “Joe Beef,” highlights among other things the nineteenth-century tavern keeper’s menagerie featuring monkeys, parrots, various wild cats, bears, and at one point a buffalo. Approaching the urban from a history of medicine perspective, J.T.H. Connor examines vivisection in Canadian cities in the context of biomedical research during the nineteenth century.62
More recently, a number of Canadian historians have acknowledged the importance of nonhuman animals in the urban environment in ways that speak to current trends within the animal turn. We have already mentioned the ways in which Canadian environmental historians have brought animals back into focus. In Stéphane Castonguay and Michèle Dagenais’s edited collection on the environmental history of Montreal (which draws heavily on the metropolitan-hinterland framework), Darcy Ingram describes the foxes, horses, and hounds that formed the fox hunt on the periphery of that city. At other points he deals with the rise of the animal welfare movement in urban Canada in response to the abuse of horses and other animals. Sean Kheraj has examined animals in Stanley Park, Vancouver’s beloved public green space, and described nineteenth-century Toronto and Winnipeg as “multi-species” cities teeming with dogs, cows, horses, sheep, pigs, and chickens. Reflecting yet another approach, Lianne McTavish and Jingjing Zheng have highlighted the successful campaign in the 1950s to rid rural and urban Alberta of rats, and Richard Mackie observes similar efforts with regard to cougars on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.63 An overlooked arena is Canadian food studies, in which animals and animal products are literally consumed. Ester Reiter has shown that histories of urbanization, precarious labour, and fast food restaurants serving cheap meat-filled hamburgers are mutually constitutive, while meat and dairy figure prominently in Ian Mosby’s account of food rationing and its relationship to gender and urban economies during the Second World War.64
At the microscopic level, bacteria and other biota fit into histories of pestilence in humans and animals, notably those involved in the decimation of Indigenous populations after contact with white settlers, cholera outbreaks in the nineteenth century, influenza in the twentieth, and, more currently, a range of deadly flu strains, many of which are noteworthy for their ability to cross species boundaries. Several of these pandemics, which flourish in the compact living conditions that make up the urban environment, are still associated with racialized migrants of the human and nonhuman kind.65 Canadian historians have made some significant contributions to this literature, as evidenced by Cole Harris and Paul Hackett on First Nations’ experiences of smallpox and other diseases, Magda Fahrni and Esyllt W. Jones on influenza in Montreal and Winnipeg, Liza Piper on polio in Chesterfield Inlet, and Geoffrey Bilson’s oeuvre on cholera, which has much to say about Canadian cities as vectors for the spread of this bacteria-based illness.66 Still, the focus moves typically from these tiny life forms directly to humans, with relatively little consideration of the place of animals in these and other outbreaks. Here, Patricia Thornton and Sherry Olson’s work on the interconnection of horses and flies as vectors for the spread of bacteria and an explanation for shifting rates of infant mortality in Montreal provides a striking illustration of the potential such a perspective offers.67
Animal Metropolis at a Glance
Much more remains to be done as if we are to consider the possibilities in Canada of histories that de-centre the human animal. Given Canada’s status as a nation on the front lines of modernity, occupying half a continent on which the many and diverse inhabitants of urban, rural, and wild alternately collide and cohabit in ways few other countries can imagine, the possibilities to do so are endless. Animal Metropolis gestures in this direction.
The ten essays that comprise this collection are organized in roughly chronological order. They didn’t have to be. Each chapter stands alone, and complementary themes invite various groupings. Readers interested in an analysis of animals as spectacle, for example, might begin with Christabelle Sethna’s discussion of the racialized journey of Jumbo, which links the zoo and circus elephant who was killed in St. Thomas, Ontario, to histories of slavery and freakery. From there, they would find it valuable to proceed to William Knight’s analysis of the fish on display at the Dominion Fisheries Museum in Ottawa, Ontario; to Kristoffer Archibald’s assessment of polar bear tourism in Churchill, Manitoba; and finally to Jason Colby’s exploration of orca captivity in Vancouver, British Columbia. In doing so, they would discover through Sethna and Archibald a sense of the ways in which inhabitants of cities in economic decline have turned to nonhuman animals to revive their fortunes via tourism – in Sethna’s case through the memory of Jumbo, in Archibald’s through a complex web of interests reflected in Churchill’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. They would also find links between Colby’s treatment of live, captive, captivating whales for entertainment purposes and Knight’s consideration of live and dead fish culture exhibits held supposedly in the name of science.
Other readers might wish to begin by considering the place of nonhuman animal labour in the city. A photo essay by Rachel Poliquin on the history of beavers in Stanley Park honours this iconic species as the ultimate hard-working comeback animal. In spite of a fur trade that virtually wiped out the creature, the beaver surfaces again and again, labouring diligently in its own interests in ways that defy human management of the built environment. Sherry Olson’s coverage of horses in industrializing Montreal redirects our focus away from humans and toward the horse as key not only to the labour demands of the nineteenth-century city but also to its spatial layout. As Olson notes, the draft horse had a profound impact on urban design, the traces of which reveal a city built much closer to human and animal scale than it would be following the advent of electric passenger cars and the automobile. From a strikingly different angle, Joanna Dean demonstrates the unforeseen consequences of animal labour through the circulation of tetanus bacilli from horse to human. From here, she describes a new form of animal labour in which horses’ living bodies were used in the production of tetanus antitoxin. Carla Hustak’s investigation of dairy cows echoes some of these concerns in the connection of milk production to issues of sanitation, municipal regulation, and urban reform at the turn of the century, the implications of which stretch far beyond her specific example of Hamilton, Ontario. Yet another approach can be found in Darcy Ingram’s interest in the care of labouring animals in the nineteenth-century city vis-à-vis the evolution of Canada’s animal welfare movement. In following this route through the text, readers will also meet via Ingram and Hustak some careful consideration of the intersection of animals and gender; in Ingram’s case it concerns the marginalization of women in Canada’s animal welfare movement while in Hustak’s account it emerges with regard to the intersection of cows, infants, and motherhood. They will also no doubt find that the question of animal labour underpins both Sethna’s and Colby’s explorations of animal spectacle and performance.
An equally profitable approach would be to consider those chapters that speak to the history of medicine and public health. Hustak’s inquiry on sanitation and Dean’s discussion of tetanus carry us to George Colpitts’ research on efforts to eliminate the spread of rabies to human and human animals in and around Banff, Alberta, during the 1950s. As a unique and compelling deconstruction of multiple binaries, be it wild versus domestic nonhuman animals; the city versus the periphery; or urban versus wilderness space, Colpitts’ chapter manages in one way or another to complement much of what takes shape in Animal Metropolis. Perhaps most importantly, it invites us to consider the degree to which the environment and environmental history perspectives figure in these chapters, be it in Olson’s careful attention to the built environment of Montreal, Archibald and Colby’s awareness of the intersection of urban and wilderness identities in Vancouver and Churchill, or Ingram’s attention to the impact of agricultural and industrial economics on an animal welfare movement that drew much of its energy from the urban world.
We hope this edited collection functions as a stepping stone for Canadian scholars to participate in the animal turn, and that readers will come away with a sense of the vitality that characterizes this area of inquiry. No one discipline or field of study, whether environmental or social history; ecofeminism, postcolonialism, or posthumanism; or cultural or urban geography, has a lock on research into nonhuman animals or their encounters with humans. Overall, Animal Metropolis is rooted in the discipline of history, some of it environmental and some not. However, we are convinced that Canadian scholars from various disciplines will offer their theories, methods, and epistemologies to the animal turn, providing the grounds for the fruitful exchanges. In this way, we stand to gain a new and valuable multidisciplinary scholarship.
Notes
1 Statistics Canada, 2011 Census of Population, Population, urban and rural, by province and territory (Canada), http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/demo62a-eng.htm.
2 Claude Lévi-Strauss’s comment about totemic animals, “Les animaux sont bons à penser,” has become a touchstone in animal studies, to the point that it is often mistranslated (most frequently as “animals are good to think with”) and misinterpreted. See Le Totémisme Aujourd’hui (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962).
3 John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” in About Looking (London: Writers and Readers, 1980), 1–26; quotations on pp. 24, 26. The essay was first published in three parts in 1977, and in Penguin Books Great Ideas series as Why Look at Animals? (2009).
4 Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 187. Film historians who have developed Berger’s declensionist narrative include Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), and Derek Bouse, Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). See also Randy Malamud, Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
5 “‘Udderley Art’ Public Art Exhibit: Where Did All the Cows Go?” The Examiner, 22 February 2010, http://www.examiner.com/article/udderly-art-public-art-exhibit-where-did-all-the-cows-go (accessed 19 December 2014); “Moose in the City,” http://www1.toronto.ca/wps/portal/contentonly?vgnextoid=1b9833d602943410VgnVCM10000071d60f89RCRD&vgnextchannel=4284ba2ae8b1e310VgnVCM10000071d60f89RCRD (accessed 19 December 2014); and “National Gallery of Canada: Collections.” https://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=101000 (accessed 19 December 2014).
6 Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books 1998), 44. See also her “Traces and Representations: Animal Pasts in London’s Present,” The London Journal 36, no. 1 (2011): 54–71.
7 Scott Miltenberger, “Viewing an Anthrozootic City: Humans, Domesticated Animals, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century New York,” in Susan Nance, ed., The Historical Animal (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015), 261–71.
8 Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Margaret Derry, Horses in Society: A Story of Animal Breeding and Marketing Culture, 1800–1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Leah M. Grandy, “The Era of the Urban Horse: Saint John, New Brunswick, 1871–1901” (MA thesis, University of New Brunswick, 2004). See also Joanna Dean and Lucas Wilson, “Horse Power in the Modern City,” in Powering Up: A Social History of the Fuels and Energy that Created Modern Canada, ed. Ruth Sandwell (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015).
9 Jason Hribal, “Animals Are Part of the Working Class: A Challenge to Labor History,” Labor History 44, no. 4 (2003): 435–54, and “Animals Are Part of the Working Class, Reviewed,” borderlands 11, no. 2 (2012): 1–34.
10 Jonathan Burt, “John Berger’s ‘Why Look at Animals?’: A Close Reading,” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, Ecology 9, no. 2 (2005): 203–18. For his arguments on the impact of the visual animal on animal welfare movements, see Burt, Animals in Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2002).
11 James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (London: Allen Lane, 1983); Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
12 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987)
13 Matthew Brower submits that Berger’s elegy is itself a compensatory fantasy. Like Jonathon Burt, Matthew Brower calls for us to understand image making (in his case, wildlife photography) as a historical process that structures our relation with animals. Matthew Brower, Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), xv.
14 Robert Preece, Animals and Nature: Cultural Myths, Cultural Realities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999); Janice Fiamengo, ed., Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2007); Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2009), 11; Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds., Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010).
15 See Myra J. Hird, “Animal Transex,” Australian Feminist Studies 21, no. 49 (2006): 35–50, and Christabelle Sethna, “Animal Sex: Purity Education and the Naturalization of the Abstinence Agenda,” Sex Education 10, no. 3 (2010): 267–79.
16 Julie Livingston and Jasbir K. Puar, “Interspecies,” Social Text 29, no. 1 106 (Spring 2011): 3.
17 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81. See also her Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989).
18 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
19 Rosi Braidotti, “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others,” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 526. See also Maneesha Deckha, “Toward a Postcolonial, Posthumanist Feminist Theory: Centralizing Race and Culture in Feminist Work on Nonhuman Animals,” Hypatia 27, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 527–45.
20 Jacques Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I Am,” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 4 (2002): 369–418. Gerald L. Bruns, “Derrida’s Cat (Who Am I?),” Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008): 404–23. For another insightful critique of animal rights see Matthew Calarco, Thinking Through Animals (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).
21 Kari Weil, “A Report on the Animal Turn,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2010): 1–23, esp. 19.
22 Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: New York Review, 1975). Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
23 Peter Singer, “A Response to Martha Nussbaum,” 2002, http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/20021113.htm, (accessed 9 January 2016).
24 David Nibert, “Animals, Immigrants, and Profits: Slaughterhouses and the Political Economy of Oppression,” in Critical Animal Studies: Thinking the Unthinkable, ed. John Sorenson (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2014), 3–17. See also Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (Tucson, AZ: Sharp Press, 2003 [1906]).
25 Carol J. Adams, “The War on Compassion,” in Sorenson, Critical Animal Studies, 18–28. See also Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, eds., The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Carol J. Adams, “Ecofeminism and the Eating of Animals,” Hypatia 6, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 125–45; and The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990).
26 See Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, eds., The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Paolo Cavalieri, “The Meaning of the Great Ape Project,” Politics and Animals, 1, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 16–34. See also “Ireland May Be the Next Country to Free Animals as ‘Non-Human’ Persons,” http://www.projetogap.org.br/en/noticia/ireland-may-next-country-free-animals-non-human-persons/ (accessed 26 January 2015).
27 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001 [1991]); Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, Introduction to Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations, ed. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–35.
28 David Gary Shaw, “A Way with Animals,” in History and Theory 52, no. 4, Special Issue: Does History Need Animals? (December 2013): 1–12, and “ Horses and Actor-Networks: Manufacturing Travel in Later Medieval England,” in The Historical Animal, ed. Susan Nance (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015).
29 See J. Macgregor Wise, “Assemblage,” in Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, 2nd ed. (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2013), 91–102, and Vinciane Despret, “From Secret Agents to Interagency,” History and Theory 52, no. 4 (December 2013): 29–44.
30 For example, see Susan J. Pearson and Mary Weismantel, “Does the ‘Animal’ Exist? Toward a Theory of Social Life of Animals,” in Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans and the Study of History, ed. Dorothee Brantz (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 17–37.
31 Despret, “From Secret Agents to Interagency,” ibid., 29-44; Chris Pearson, “Dogs, History and Agency,” ibid., 128–45.
32 Haraway describes the co-evolution of and intimate working relationships of canine and human in When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).
33 Jennifer Adams Martin argues that we might usefully move humans off stage altogether. In “When Sharks (Don’t) Attack,” she suggests we turn from the familiar and human-centred stories of shark attacks to consider the larger history of shark communities. Jennifer Adams Martin, “When Sharks (Don’t) Attack: Wild Animal Agency in Historical Narratives,” Environmental History 16, no. 3 (July 2011): 451–55. See also Linda Nash, “The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?” Environmental History 10, no. 1 (January 2005): 67–69. Animal history also forces the historian to recognize the human as an embodied and material being engaged in messy and complicated ways with other such beings. As Val Plumwood observed of her own violent and intimate encounter with a crocodile, “Crocodile predation on human threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery of the planet in which we are predators but can never ourselves be prey. We may daily consume other animals in their billions, but we ourselves cannot be food for worms and certainly not meat for crocodiles.” Cited in Brett L. Walker, “Animals and the Intimacy of History,” History and Theory, 52, no. 4 (December 2013): 45–67.
34 Mahesh Rangarajan, “Animals with Rich Histories: The Case of the Lions of Gir Forest, Gujarat, India,” 52, no. 4 (December 2013): 109–27. See also Jon Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), and Ryan Tucker Jones, “Running into Whales: The History of the North Pacific from below the Waves,” American Historical Review 118, no. 2 (April 2013): 377.
35 Eric Baratay, Le point de vue animal: Une autre version de l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 2012); Jason Hribal, Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013); and Erica Fudge, “Milking Other Men’s Beasts,” History and Theory, 52, no. 4 (December 2013): 13–28. Vinciane Despret presses historians to pay attention to subtler signs. She notes that we tend not to notice the agency of the working animal who actively, and willingly, collaborates: “When animals do what they know is expected of them, everything begins to look like a machine that is functioning, and their obedience looks “mechanical,” a word that conveys its meaning very well.” Despret, “From Secret Agents to Interagency,” 43.
36 Susan Nance, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Takashi Ito, London Zoo and the Victorians, 1828–1859 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2014); and Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
37 Peter Atkins, ed., Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012); Philip Howells, “Flush and Banditti: Dog-Stealing in Victorian London,” in Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations, ed. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (London: Routledge, 2000): 350–55; Hannah Velten, Beastly London: A History of Animals in the City (London: Reaktion Books, 2013); Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); “The ‘Swinish Multitude’: Controversies over Hogs in Antebellum New York City,” Journal of Urban History 37, no. 5 (September 2011): 639–60; Andrea Gaynor, “Animal Agendas: Conflict over Productive Animals in Twentieth-Century Australian Cities,” Society and Animals 15 (2007): 29–42; Alice Hovorka, “Transspecies Urban Theory: Chickens in an African city,” Cultural Geographies 15 (2008): 119–41.
38 Etienne Benson, “The Urbanization of the Eastern Gray Squirrel,” Journal of American History 100, no. 3 (2013): 691–710.
39 Karen Brown, Mad Dogs and Meerkats: A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013); Dawn Biehler, Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches and Rats (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014); Environment and History 21, no. 4 (November 2015); and Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnson II, eds., Trash Animals: How We Live With Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive and Unwanted Species (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
40 Alan Rayburn, Naming Canada: Stories about Canadian Place Names (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001 [1994]), 229–37.
41 Alex Tesar, “Finding Winnie: Everyone’s Favourite Bear Goes to War,” The Walrus, November 2015, p. 25. “Winnipeg” is a Cree term for “muddy water.”
42 Except for one full article on houseflies, with a paragraph on horses, the abstracts in Urban History Review make only very occasional reference to nonhuman animals. See Valerie Minnett and Mary-Anne Poutanen, “Swatting Flies for Health: Children and Tuberculosis in Early Twentieth- Century Montreal,” Urban History Review 36, no. 1 (2007): 32. Several articles consider disease in the Spring 2008 issue, although the role of the microbe is largely offstage.
43 Taryn M. Graham and Troy D. Glover, “On the Fence: Dog Parks in the (Un)Leashing of Community and Social Capital,” Leisure Sciences: An Interdisciplinary Journal 36, no. 3 (2014): 217–34, and Heidi J. Nast, “Loving . . . Whatever: Alienation, Neoliberalism and Pet-Love in the Twenty-First Century,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 5, no. 2 (2006): 300–327.
44 Harold Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1930).
45 For example see: Sherene H. Razack, Dying From Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 166–71; Olive P. Dickason, The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1997 [1984]), 61–84; and Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling the Future: Summary of the Final Report (Ottawa: Library and Archives of Canada, 2015), http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Final%20Reports/Executive_Summary_English_Web.pdf (accessed 9 January 2016).
46 Bill Parenteau, “‘Care, Control and Supervision’: Native People in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867–1900,” Canadian Historical Review 79, no. 1 (1998): 1–35; Bill Parenteau, “A ‘Very Determined Opposition to the Law’: Conservation, Angling Leases, and Social Conflict in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867–1914,” Environmental History 9, no. 3 (2004): 436–63; Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006); Tina Loo, “Making a Modern Wilderness: Conserving Wildlife in Twentieth-Century Canada,” Canadian Historical Review 82, no. 1 (2001): 92–121; Tina Loo, “Of Moose and Men: Hunting For Masculinities in British Columbia, 1880–1939,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (2001): 296–319; John Sandlos, Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007); George Colpitts, Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940 (Vancouver and Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2002); Darin Kinsey, “Fashioning a Freshwater Eden: Elite Anglers, Fish Culture, and State Development of Québec’s ‘Sport’ Fishery” (PhD thesis, l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, 2008); Darcy Ingram, Wildlife, Conservation and Conflict in Quebec, 1840–1914 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013); Neil S. Forkey, “Anglers, Fishers and the St. Croix River: Conflict in a Canadian-American Borderland, 1867–1900,” Forest and Conservation History 37, no. 4 (1993): 160–66.
47 See, for example, Paul Nadasdy, “The Gift in the Animal: The Ontology of Hunting and Human-Animal Sociality,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 1 (February 2007): 25–43. Harvey A. Feit, “Hunting and the Quest for Power, the James Bay Cree and Whitemen in the Twentieth Century,” in Native Peoples: The Canadian Experience, 2nd ed., ed. R.B. Morrison and C.R. Wilson (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994), 181–223.
48 For an intervention in Canadian rural history see Royden Loewern, “ ‘Come Watch This Spider’: Animals, Mennonites, and Indices of Modernity,” Canadian Historical Review ٩٦, no. 1 (2015): 61–90.
49 “From Henley to the High Park Peacock, Toronto’s Animal Tales from 2015,” Toronto Star, 27 December 2015, http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/12/27/unbelievable-cute-quirky-animal-stories-of-2015.html (accessed 8 January 2016).
50 Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2005).
51 Corey Laroque, “Rare Sighting: Snowy Owl Spotted in the City,” Niagara Falls Review, 6 November 2008, http://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/2008/11/06/rare-sighting-snowy-owl-spotted-in-city (accessed 26 January 2015); Grouse Mountain Bear Cam, https://www.grousemountain.com/wildlife-refuge/bear-cam (accessed 26 January 2015); “Fox Takes Nap in an Unlikely Place and #busfox Is Born,” CBC NEWS, 23 July 2014, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/fox-takes-nap-in-an-unlikely-place-and-busfox-is-born-1.2715625 (accessed 29 January 2015).
52 See Alex Consiglio, “Man Who Attacked Raccoons With Shovel Pleads Guilty,” Toronto Star, 12 March 2013. http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2013/03/12/man_who_attacked_raccoons_with_shovel_pleads_guilty_to_animal_cruelty.html (accessed 17 December 2014); and “Emma Czornobaj Gets 90 Days in Jail for Duck-Stopping Deaths, CBCNews, 18 December 2014. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/emma-czornobaj-gets-90-days-in-jail-for-duck-stopping-deaths-1.2877437 (accessed 18 December 2014).
53 Annabelle Sabloff, Re-ordering the Natural World: Humans and Animals in the City (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 5.
54 Maciej Luniak, “Synurbanization-Adaption of Animal Wildlife to Urban Development,” in Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Urban Wildlife Conservation, 1–5 May, 1999, ed. William W. Shaw, Lisa K. Harris, and Larry Vandruff (Tucson, Arizona: 2004); Stephen S. Ditchkoff, Sarah T. Saalfeld and Charles J. Gibson, “Animal Behavior in Urban Ecosystems: Modifications Due to Human-Induced Stress,” Urban Ecosystems 9 (2006): 5–12; and Jim Sterba, Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds (New York: Broadway Books, 2012).
55 This changed in 2011, to reflect the variation between small population areas of 1,000 to 29,999, large centres with over 100,000, and medium centres between. See http://www.statcan.gc.ca/subjects-sujets/standard-norme/sgc-cgt/notice-avis/sgc-cgt-06-eng.htm.
56 See the Qikigtani Truth Commission: Thematic Reports and Special Studies (2013); Frank James Tester, “Mad Dogs and (Mostly) Englishmen: Colonial Relations, Commodities and the Fate of Inuit sled dogs,” Creative Technologies 34, no. 2 (2010): 129–47; and “Can the Sled Dog Sleep? Postcolonialism, Cultural Transformation and the Consumption of Inuit Culture,” in New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 3, no. 3 (June 2010): 7–19; and Qimmit: A Clash of Two Truths (National Film Board: 2010). Animals continue to figure in the modern northern imaginary. A 2014 video game, Never Alone, tellingly focuses on the relationship between an Inupiat girl and a mystical fox.
57 Jennifer R. Wolch, Kathleen West, and Thomas E. Gaines, “Transspecies Urban Theory,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13, no. 6 (1995): 735–60.
58 Jennifer Wolch, “Zoöpolis,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 7, no. 2 (1996): 29.
59 Chris Philo, “Animals, Geography, and the City: Notes on Inclusions and Exclusions,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13, no. 6 (1995): 655–81. See also Jody Emel, Chris Wilbert, and Jennifer Wolch, “Animal Geographies,” Society and Animals 10, no. 4 (2002): 407–12.
60 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 51.
61 J.M.S. Careless, Frontier and Metropolis: Regions, Cities, and Identities in Canada Before 1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989).
62 Bettina Bradbury, “Pigs, Cows and Boarders: Non-Wage Forms of Survival Among Montreal Families, 1861–91,” Labour/Le Travail 14 (1984): 9–46; see also Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Margaret Heap, “La gréve des charretiers à Montréal, 1864,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 31, no. 3 (1977): 371–95; Peter deLottinville, “Joe Beef of Montreal: Working-Class Culture and the Tavern,” Labour/Le Travailleur 8/9 (1981/82): 9–40, esp. 14–15; J.T.H. Connor, “Cruel Knives? Vivisection and Biomedical Research in Victorian Canada,” CBMH/BCHM 14 (1997): 37–64.
63 Sean Kheraj, “Demonstration Wildlife: Negotiating the Animal Landscape of Vancouver’s Stanley Park, 1888–1996,” Environment and History 18, no. 4 (2012): 497–527; Darcy Ingram, “Horses, Hedges and Hegemony: Foxhunting in the Montreal Countryside,” in Metropolitan Natures: Urban Environmental Histories of Montreal, ed. Stéphane Castonguay and Michèle Dagenais (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 211–27; Darcy Ingram, “Beastly Measures: Animal Welfare, Civil Society, and State Policy in Victorian Canada,” Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue d’études canadiennes 47, no. 1 (2013): 221–52; 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 “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 (Bloomsbury, 2015); 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; Richard Mackie, “Cougars, Colonists, and the Rural Settlement of Vancouver Island,” in Beyond the City Limits: Rural History in British Columbia, ed. Ruth Sandwell (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999): 120–41. See also Jodi Giesbrecht, ‘‘Killing the Beast: Animal Death in Canadian Literature, Hunting, Photography, Taxidermy, and Slaughterhouses, 1865–1920’’ (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2012).
64 Ester Reiter, Making Fast Food: From the Frying into the Fryer (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991); and Ian Mosby, Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014).
65 Alfred W. Crosby, “Ecological Imperialism: The Overseas Migration of Western Europeans as a Biological Phenomenon,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 103–17; Myron Echenberg, Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Esyllt Jones, “‘Co-operation in All Human Endeavor’: Quarantine and Immigrant Disease Vectors in the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic in Winnipeg,” CBMH/BCHM 22, no. 1 (2005): 57–82; Ho-fung Hung, “The Politics of SARS: Containing the Perils of Globalization by More Globalization,” Asian Perspective 28, no. 1 (2004): 19–44.
66 Cole Harris, “Voices of Smallpox around the Strait of Georgia,” The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Change (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), 3–30; Paul Hackett, “Averting Disaster: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Smallpox in Western Canada During the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78, no. 3 (2004): 575–609; Magda Fahrni and Esyllt W. Jones, eds., Epidemic Encounters: Influenza, Society, and Culture in Canada, 1918–20 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013); Esyllt W. Jones, Influenza 1918: Disease, Death and Struggle in Winnipeg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Liza Piper, “Chesterfield Inlet, 1949 and the Ecology of Epidemic Polio,” Environmental History 20 (2015): 67–98; Geoffrey Bilson, A Darkened House: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). For an application of Alfred Crosby’s ideas to Canada, see Liza Piper and John Sandlos, “A Broken Frontier: Ecological Imperialism in the Canadian North,” Environmental History 12, no. 4 (October 2007): 759–95.
67 Patricia Thornton and Sherry Olson, “Mortality in Late Nineteenth-Century Montreal: Geographic Pathways of Contagion,” Population Studies 65, no. 2 (2011): 157–81.