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Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, we tackle the 18th-century Russian import of elephants as a case of early modern technological transfer which recruited knowledge of Persian mahouts, German anatomists, and Russian furriers. Their efforts served to maintain imperial power in and with animal life and death.

Paper long abstract:

Political contacts and competition between two 18th-century empires, Russian Empire and Shakh Persia, brought about a regular gift exchange, which included a specific range of prestigious animals – birds of prey, highbred horses, and, last but not least, Indian elephants. Despite the failures of early instances of elephant transfer, diplomats on both sides sought to secure dispatch of animals and considered them as avatars of power both for the donor and the recipient.

Moving elephants to Russia depended primarily on Persian mahouts (often of Indian origin) who accompanied animals on the way and cared for them in Russia. They were responsible for animals’ well-being and ordered fodder and medications according to the principles of Indian “Elephant Science” (Hastyayurveda). Thus the Russian court facilitated a transfer of a complex environment which was laid out after an indigenous expertise. Furthermore, the death of an animal did not put an end to its charismatic duties but instead demanded another type of expert knowledge to step in. In these cases, the Imperial Court Office sought skills of naturalists and anatomists in the Academy of Sciences as well as craft of local furriers. Relocating animals to Kunstkammer meant their incorporation into the body of European anatomy and a tribute to the culture of curiosity.

In this presentation, we tackle the 18th-century import of elephants as a case of early modern technological transfer which recruited bodies of knowledge from disparate domains. As such, it served to maintain imperial power both in animal life and death.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will trace the scientific transportation and testing of 'extreme creatures' - those thought to look peculiar, or inhabit extreme environments. It will consider how animal and knowledge were made mobile, as western scientists attempted to 'move closer' to understanding animal Otherness.

Paper long abstract:

Across the nineteenth century, western naturalists and scientists extracted creatures from their habitats, and moved them to the city, the museum, the laboratory. Here, their bodies were examined and tested. Animals at the extremes - both those that inhabited difficult to access environments, and those that seemed 'peculiar' - prompted urgent questions. How, these scientists mused, did such creatures experience the world around them? The British naturalist John Lubbock, writing in the 1880s, exclaimed: ‘how different the world may – I was going to say must – appear to other animals from what it does to us.’

This paper will trace the identification, transportation, and the testing of these 'extreme creatures' across diverse contexts and environments. Drawing on case studies from deep sea exploration and collection, to the dissection of the star-nosed mole, it will focus on the ways in which scientists attempted to understand these animals, and their sensory and bodily adaptations. But, more than that, it will explore how knowledge about the animal Other was made mobile, and transformed across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as scientists attempted to 'move closer' to knowing these creatures. However, as this paper will argue, this often revealed more about the human animal, and their reliance on their own embodied experiences of the world, than it did about these 'extreme' creatures. Fundamentally, whilst scientists could look in greater depth, and harness new technologies to peer at their animal subjects, they could never know what it was to be that creature.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper illustrates a paradigm shift in the Belgian approach to combatting vector-borne infectious diseases by discussing how insect mobility influenced the development of eco-medical knowledge and the spatiality of colonial healthcare measures in the Belgian Congo (1908-1960).

Paper long abstract:

Mosquitos and tsetse flies were highly influential in shaping the course of colonial expansion in the Belgian Congo (1908-1960), especially for their ability to transmit parasites that cause malaria and sleeping sickness. These insects adapted swiftly to the large-scale human alteration of their habitats by resettling into newly created urban and industrial landscapes. Their movement forced colonial administrators to respond to their behaviour and associated health risks. In this paper, I will examine how mosquito and tsetse fly mobility influenced the development of colonial healthcare in the Belgian Congo, in order to show that the Belgian approach to combatting vector-borne infectious diseases witnessed a paradigm shift. I will discuss how public health administrators increasingly adopted ecologically oriented preventive healthcare measures targeted at vector control, which they based on newly developed expertise on insect behaviour. This analysis runs counter to prevailing views in historiography that Belgian colonial disease control was purely medical and not concerned with environmental approaches to healthcare like vector elimination. My analysis will be based on reports of Belgian medical experts and on annual charts of Congolese ‘sanitary brigades’ employed by the colonial Public Hygiene Department. These brigades were expected to examine mosquito mobility, to transfer the insects to laboratories for medical entomological research and to eliminate the species’ breeding grounds. By focusing on the influence of insect agency, this paper will shed new light on the development of colonial eco-medical knowledge production, the spatiality of colonial healthcare measures and their consequences for human lives and more-than-human landscapes.

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Paper short abstract:

The introduction of bass to Ontario’s Algonquin Park in 1896 provides a contrast to transcontinental fish movements typical of the late 19th-century. This talk focuses on the local scale of this introduction, the role of railways and anglers, and the gradual awareness of its environmental impacts.

Paper long abstract:

Fish introductions expanded in the mid-nineteenth century thanks to steam-powered transportation and took place on vast scales. In North America, fish culturists traded western and eastern fish species via the transcontinental railways, while English fish culturists shipped European brown trout across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to Tasmania, Australia, and New Zealand. These introductions, which established naturalized populations, met colonial desires to create familiar types of angling for settlers. These acclimatization “successes” are well known, but fish introductions also took place on very local scales with fish moving over shorter distances. A case in point is the introduction of smallmouth bass (Micropterus dolomieu) to Algonquin Park in Ontario. The park, established in 1893 ostensibly to protect headwaters and old-growth forests, led to Indigenous dispossession, increased forest harvesting, tourist exploitation, and the construction of a railway across the park’s headwater area. State and railway officials quickly moved to transport smallmouth bass—a popular gamefish that was native to the lower-elevation waters that surrounded the park—via the railway into the park. Algonquin’s lakes had provided vital habitat to cold-water species such as brook and lake trout, burbot and other species. But hydrological changes wrought by forestry and railway engineering enabled smallmouth bass to establish themselves and slowly spread through the park’s network of lakes and rivers, displacing trout. This presentation maps out this railway-facilitated introduction, highlighting its local scale and the impacts that biologists only began to register later in the twentieth century as they recognized bass as an invasive species.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a strange episode in medical care after World War I: the establishment of a hospital for “veteran” war horses in Cairo. The paper builds on literature on veterans and post-war imperial recovery to ask how animals crossed borders and moved knowledge in the British Empire.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores a strange and largely forgotten episode in medical care after World War I: the establishment of a hospital for “veteran” war horses in Cairo. Left in Egypt after being used by the British forces in the Middle East, dozens of horses and donkeys were found in Cairo, many of them repurposed for civilian transportation. British charities mobilized the public image of the human veteran to recruit donations and resources to “save” the horses, healing the wounds of the war through the animal body. Lobbyists and animal activists presented this hospital as a form of caring for the non-human soldiers who won the war while also establishing Western animal care as part of Britain’s “civilizing mission” for the Middle East. But the scientific practice itself crossed boundaries and moved knowledge in both ways: veterinarians at the hospital were primarily local, Egyptian men, even though the director of the hospital and the donors were British. This paper builds on literature on veterans and post-war imperial recovery to ask how animals crossed borders and moved knowledge in the context of British colonialism. What does it mean for animals to be considered soldiers, patriots, and veterans? How was animal-care colonialized yet localized in this institution? Moreover, what can we learn about classic issues of the inter-war era – displacement, veteran care, rehabilitation – when we look at animals rather than humans?

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Paper short abstract:

I’ll talk about European bison brought from Bialowieza to Imperial residences near St.Petersburg. The main focus would be the expertise: traditional knowledge and training of the keepers, their eagerness to accept scientific advice, the reasons to keep the bison in the imperial residences, etc.

Paper long abstract:

The European bison from Bialowieza Primeval Forest lived in the residences of Russian emperors since the mid-19th century. By the eve of WWI, at least 35 bison dwelled in the Gatchina Imperial hunting ground near St.Petersburg alone (it was the second largest population kept in captivity). Due to the specific conditions of the Russian Ministry of Imperial Court, information about those animals rarely reached professional zoologists or the academic periodicals, and during the first chaotic year after the Romanovs’ dethroning all Gatchina bison were killed, sharing the fate of the wild European bison. Some of their skeletons and skins are preserved in the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and some information – on the pages of hunting periodicals, but mainly in the archival files. In my presentation, based on the survived documents, I’ll talk about European bison brought from Bialowieza Forest to St.Petersburg vicinities and transported from St.Petersburg to other places. The main focus will be made on expertise: how much did the closed community of the imperial hunt administration rely on its own traditional knowledge, and when was it willing to accept advice from modern scientific knowledge? What kind of training had the people who were involved in caring for the bison? How did the caring for the bison change between the mid-19th and the early 20th century? Why were the bison kept in the Romanov’s residences? To whom and in what cases did the Russian tsars grant European bison, and whose requests were rejected?

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores feral hogs in the twentieth century US South. Both hunters and wildlife officials intentionally released European wild boar, yet overtime wildlife biologists reframed feral hogs as an invasive nuisance species as both economic and environmental damage increased in the region.

Paper long abstract:

Feral hogs occupy a unique position in the popular imagination of the US South. On the one hand, they are a familiar feature of the southern landscape, with some universities even adopting them as mascots. On the other, they cause an estimated two and a half billion dollars in damage annually. Remarkably, despite this broad cultural familiarity with the animals, feral hogs remain understudied, and their transition from desirable game species to invasive species has yet to attract the attention of environmental historians.

That story is an inherently transnational one, beginning in the early twentieth century when sportsmen began purchasing European wild boar to place in private game reserves as a big game species that offered a thrilling and exotic hunting experience. Over time a mixture of unintentional boar escapes, the intentional relocation of boars by state wildlife officials, and private citizens’ trapping and dispersal efforts led to an explosion of feral hog populations in the region. As the economic and environmental damage inflicted by feral hogs increased, wildlife departments shifted from hunter-centric policies to a position that discouraged further dispersal of feral pig populations. By the 1980s, wildlife biologists had begun framing feral hogs as an invasive nuisance that created a number of environmental problems. Yet hog hunters continued to lobby for hog hunting and continued to trap and release hogs in new areas. This reframing of feral hogs underscores the significant role wildlife agencies and hunter advocates played in shaping the contested modern categorization of feral pigs.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the United States Fish Commission's role in revamping the fish fauna of the Pacific World. Often motivated by settler-colonial logic and dispossession, the USFC transformed the watersheds of the American West and broader Pacific World through the introduction of new species.

Paper long abstract:

Congress created the United States Fish Commission (USFC) in 1871 to investigate the causes of fish diminution on the Atlantic seaboard, but the USFC’s remit soon expanded from study to intervention. Using the new techniques of “fish culture”—the artificial fecundation of fish—the USFC embarked on a decades-long campaign to remake America’s watersheds by artificially restocking desired species, transplanting favored native species to new waters, and the introduction of foreign fish. The USFC also exported American fish abroad—typically chinook salmon, shad, and whitefish—to nations like Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Germany. Yet this massive episode of bioengineering has been largely overlooked.

The USFC’s impact was global, but I focus here on its Pacific World activity and the settler-colonial logic that underpinned it. In settler California, the USFC set up one of its first hatcheries for salmon propagation on the McCloud River, where it dispossessed the local Winnemem Wintu people, a little-known story of colonial violence. The USFC distributed millions of chinook salmon from the McCloud hatchery across America and to foreign nations interested in fish “acclimatization,” the contemporary term for foreign species introductions. New Zealander and Australian acclimatization societies contracted with the USFC to introduce chinook salmon there in hopes of remaking waters to better suit the culinary tastes and angling preferences of European-descended settlers. The USFC also made extensive shipments of salmon and carp to Hawaii and Japan. In all this, I shift focus from Alfred Crosby's famous Atlantic World “Columbian Exchange" toward the heretofore neglected “Pacific Exchange.”

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Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on recent ethnographic fieldwork in Dovrefjell national park and explores what implications the introduction of the muskox has had on the human-muskox-reindeer relations. These are especially connected to knowledge production, supervision and negotiations over the right to roam.

Paper long abstract:

Around 90 years ago the muskox was introduced from Greenland to the high mountain area of Dovrefjell in Norway. Today a herd of around 200 muskoxen live here alongside the native wild reindeer. The latter was recently enscribed on the threatened species list while the former is classified as an alien species. This paper draws on recent ethnographic fieldwork in the national park Dovrefjell and explores what implications the introduction of the muskox has had on the area and on the human-muskox-reindeer relations.

The somewhat accidental and partly intentional introduction of the muskox has undoubtedly led to multiple and a complex set of implications, but not all of them are negative. I argue that the introduction has resulted in not only more knowledge about the muskox, but also about the reindeer. The presence of the muskox results in a lot of mass tourism, which leads to negotiations over the right to roam, which again makes monitoring and supervision of the reindeer herd in the area more important. It also facilitates studying how the reindeer reacts towards the presence of people in its habitat. Additionally, the introduction has led to what my interlocutors call “the best health monitoring programme of a muskox herd in the world”.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper will discuss the question of animals' experience during the forced migrations after the II World War. It will focus on the survival of the extreme journey to the West, and the difficulties of the adaptation on new grounds. My research is based on over 1000 memoirs of Polish migrants.

Paper long abstract:

The paper will discuss the question of animals' experience during the forced migrations after the II World War. It will focus on two stages of migratory experience. One was the survival of the extremely difficult journey from the Eastern Part of pre-war Poland to its Western parts - the former German East. The second was the adaptation to the new conditions of the inhabited territories. The Polish migrants - mostly peasants who were forced to leave their huts were often allowed to take a small number of cows, horses, and other animals with them. This was often the first experience of the journey both for peasants and animals who never had to travel on such a long distance and in such a manner (by train in a crowded car and for a very long time - sometimes even up to 8 weeks). The way animals behaved was widely described in the unique collection of memories of Polish migrants who wrote them for the popular competitions for memories in the after-war years. The descriptions of how animals acted were surprisingly numerous and focused not only on the relations of humans - non-humans and their mutual dependence but also on animals' emotional and physical condition (like fear, fatigue, and suffering, etc.). They also covered the difficult process of adaptation to new climates and rural conditions that humans and non-humans had to face. I will try to sketch the portrait of animals' migratory experience as shown in over 1000 diaries I have analyzed.