Acknowledgments

This collection evolved from a series of discussions between the editors that stretch back to 2012 and to a growing network of scholars in the Ottawa area who share an interest in that broad and increasingly complex trend known as “the animal turn.” As we reflect on the collection five years later, we find ourselves indebted to many animals, both human and non-human. For the focus on urban animals as the collection’s unifying theme we are grateful to Heather Hillsburg, then a doctoral student in the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. For making the project possible, we thank the contributors, each of whom worked hard to make the collection come together. Sean Kheraj kindly agreed to write the epilogue. At the University of Calgary Press, series editor Alan MacEachern received us enthusiastically, and Peter Enman, our first contact at UCalgary Press, did everything possible to expedite the volume through the evaluation process, and later shepherded us through the final stages of copy editing. Melina Cusano did a marvelous job of reproducing the image we selected for the cover. Feedback from two external evaluators strengthened the collection along the way. At Carleton University, the opportunity to organize the 2014 Annual Shannon Lectures in History on Beastly Histories enabled us to develop further our knowledge of the field and to benefit from the ideas and advice of many scholars. In addition to the Shannon Lectures, we have honed our ideas for the collection over the years through discussions at various conferences including the Canadian Historical Association’s annual conference and the Quelques arpents de neige environmental history workshop.

Joanna would like to thank her student, Amanda Sauermann, whose enthusiasm for the topic of animals inspired the development of a course in animal history in 2009; Carleton’s History Department for supporting the course; and the many curious students in that course’s various iterations. Thanks also to many human friends who taught her to see the horse differently and to Wyatt, Paddy, and Ruby for reinforcing those lessons. She also thanks her co-editors for their generosity at times when family demands diminished her availability for this project.

Darcy would like to thank Kathleen again and again for living through another project; their children Raine and Liam for their refreshing insights into animals and their occasional insistence that living through another project wasn’t what they wanted to do that day; and Piper, their Jack Russell Terrier, who tries with enormous enthusiasm to translate her nineteenth-century foxhunting skills into a viable career opportunity in various corners of twenty-first-century Canada and who insists on reminding them that holes are for digging, cars are for chasing, and a rancid bag of garbage is irresistible.

Christabelle thanks her mother, Gloria Sethna, and her aunts for nurturing a love of animals from early childhood onward. Alongside the encouragement of Darcy and Joanna, Stephen Brown, Vicki Burke, Fatima Correia, June Larkin, Marina Morrow, Isabelle Perreault, and Brian Ray were very supportive of her foray into this area of study. She is grateful to Saucy, Cinderella, Friday, and Beauregard, who showed her that loving a pet is an honourable endeavour.

The process of working together on this project has given to it a level of richness and diversity that none of the editors could have accomplished alone. Working consensually, each took part in a long list of tasks: contacting authors; maintaining records of correspondence; arranging meetings; communicating with the press; writing proposals; responding to the external reviewers; compiling manuscript materials; fielding chapters and assisting authors with revisions; preparing the index; designing the cover; and developing an increasingly nuanced understanding of human-non-human animal relations in Canada that we have attempted to deliver. This division of labour ebbed, flowed, and overlapped over time, and the editors are listed in alphabetical order to respect the individual and collective labour behind the project.