Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (review)

When Harriet Ritvo published her first book, The Animal Estate, in 1987, there was no such field as animal studies. As Ritvo notes in her introduction to this collection of previously published essays, many considered the idea that animals could be historical subjects (let alone historical actors) "the weirdest" of the "many weird things that have been coming out of the humanities lately" (1). That this idea is no longer considered weird, but an important avenue of humanistic study, owes much to Ritvo and her work.

The thirteen essays in this volume constitute a sample of her work, but a widely ranging one, dating from 1984 to 2008 and including prefaces and works written for wider audiences as well as scholarly articles. The organization of the volume progresses from broader studies of animal use and representation to more specialized studies of classification and breeding—two favorite Ritvo topics—concluding with the most recent essay, "Beasts in the Jungle (or Wherever)," which introduces the topic of wildness, her latest research focus. This essay (as well as others in this volume) displays Ritvo's singular talent for titles, not a talent most academics possess. Her historical purview has long been the period between 1750 and 1900, with some excursions on either side.

The historical study of animals crisscrosses into many areas of humanistic study: literature, cultural history, the history of science, environmental history, and social history. One of the great virtues of Ritvo's work has been her ability to make these disciplinary boundaries seem insignificant, but it has also made her work hard to classify. Now we can call it animal studies, but twenty years ago many had a hard time figuring out exactly where to place it. My own field of history of science still has not quite figured this out.

Why study animals? One obvious answer is that our ideas about and treatment of animals can tell us a lot about ourselves and other humans. Throughout history, animals have provided a lens through which to view human society. In an early essay, "Learning from Animals" (originally published in 1985), Ritvo analyzed the many purposes of animals in children's natural history literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. "Learning about animals," she wrote, "could help children be good, and it could help them do well" (37). Not only could animals metaphorically model correct behavior, but they could also underpin a burgeoning capitalist economy with their products and reinforce social hierarchies with their subordinate status. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, evolutionary theory as well as the increasing sophistication of science in general led to a relinquishing of metaphoric uses of animals in fiction.

The reflection of societal values in animals, particularly those values we identify as Victorian, runs through several essays in this volume. In "Sex and the Single Animal" (1988), Ritvo shows how Victorian discourses on animal breeding confirmed and reinforced existing gender norms and notions of sexual propriety. In the path-breaking "Race, Breed, and Myths of Origin: Chillingham Cattle as Ancient Britons" (1992), cattle represent fundamental British values on questions of race and descent. "Possessing Mother Nature: Genetic Capital in Eighteenth-Century Britain" (1994) further explores this idea and, in a detailed examination of the livestock breeder Robert Bakewell, opens up the increasing tension between an industrializing agriculture (to fit the needs of a growing industrial state) and the cultural and social desire for finely demarcated breeds that reinforced lines of status and class.

Another theme in this volume is political. Ritvo's introduction mentions Keith Thomas's Man and the Natural World (1983) as the book that allowed historians to take animals seriously. But a few years earlier appeared Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975), a book which, in retrospect, changed the terms of moral engagement with animals and led to renewed activism on behalf of animals. Two essays in this volume look specifically at issues surrounding...