Animal Metropolis

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

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

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

Darcy Ingram teaches in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa.

Christabelle Sethna is an historian and associate professor who teaches in the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa.

Joanna Dean is associate professor of History at Carleton University, where she teaches animal history and environmental history.

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

It is gratifying to see more involvement from historians in this broad and growing area.

—Margaret E. Derry, The Canadian Historical Review

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

—Janette Youngs, Anthrozoos

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

—Nik Taylor, Associate Professor of Sociology, Flinders University

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

—Nigel Rothfels, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

This playful and thought-provoking collection of essays makes a persuasive case for the study of urban animals in a country long celebrated for its iconic wildlife. This is an important contribution to the growing fields of animal studies and animal history, and one that will serve as a catalyst for a new generation of scholarship.

—Jennifer Bonnell, Assistant Professor, Department of History, York University