Animal Metropolis

Histories of Human-Animal Relations in Urban Canada

Table of contents

 

Introduction

Tables

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Canamalia Urbanis
Darcy Ingram, Christabelle Sthna, and Joanna Dean

1. The Memory of an Elephant: Savagery, Civilization and Spectacle
Christabelle Sethna

2. The Urban Horse and the Shaping of Montreal, 1840–1914
Sherry Olson

3. Wild Things; Taming Canada's Animal Welfare Movement
Darcy Ingram

4. Fish out of Water: Fish Exhibition in Late Nineteenth–Century Canada
William Knight

5. The Beavers of Stanley Park
Rachel Poliquin

6. Species at Risk: C. Tetani, the Horse and the Human
Joanna Dean

7. Got Milk? Dirty Cows, Unfit Mothers, and Infant Mortality, 1880–1940
Carla Hutak

8. Howl: The 1952-56 Rabies Crisis and the Creation of the Urban Wild at Banff
George Colpitts

9. Arctic Capital: Managing Polar Bears in Churchill, Manitoba
Kristoffer Archibald

10. Cetaceans in the City: Orca Captivity, Animal Rights, and Environmental Values in Vancouver
Jason Colby

Epilogue: Why Animals Matter in Urban History, or Why Cities Matter in Animal History
Sean Kheraj

Contributors

Index

Description

 

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.

Awards

  • Short-listed, BPAA Alberta Book Publishing Award - Cover Design 2018

Reviews

 

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

 

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

—Margaret E. Derry, The Canadian Historical Review