Animal Metropolis: Histories of Human-Animal Relations in Urban Canada ed. by Joanna Dean, Darcy Ingram, and Christabelle Sethna (review)

This book is a collection of ten articles (with an introduction and epilogue) dealing with the connection of animals to human affairs in Canada's cities and towns. The articles cover a number of subjects relating to domestic animals and/or wildlife between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries and the ways they interacted with urban development. The articles are rich in content and add to the growing history of animals. The animal story has become a highly interdisciplinary subject, and it is gratifying to see more involvement from historians in this broad and growing area. In general, the articles can be divided into three sets: those that deal with domestic animals, those that focus on wildlife in urban spaces, and those that use the term "animal" to cover any non-human species. The way horses could shape the development of cities by their need for feed and accommodation is the subject of an article concerned with domestic animals.

Wildlife is viewed through various lenses: display, circus, or ecotourism. Fish exhibits, the life of Jumbo the elephant, the beavers of Stanley Park, attitudes to captured orcas in Vancouver, and the rise of polar bear ecotourism in Churchill are examples of articles that focus on wildlife. The sharing of disease is a subject that runs across the domestic/wildlife divide: horses and tetanus, cows and contaminated milk, and domestic/wildlife interconnections with people via the transmission and control of rabies. One article argues that animal welfare organizations in Victorian Canada focused on animals that men, and not women, were concerned with–for example, sporting dogs. Since men controlled the situation, women were forced into minor roles. General social assumptions about gender, and the changing position of women in society over time, are linked to how animal welfare developed.

My main problem with the book arises from implications presented in the introduction. The editors suggest that a major topic running through the articles is the centrality of animal behaviour/perceptions in shaping an interrelationship with people. Both animals and humans, the editors state, "negotiate[d] their way through urban spaces" (1). However, most of the articles focus on how humans viewed, used, or controlled animals, with animals consistently playing only a background role. While it is true that animal requirements shaped human activities, I am not sure that we can say that the need to feed animals, for example, denotes animal agency or a negotiating tactic on their part. My second concern with the introduction is that it provides an overly focused historiography on the work done by historians within the general interdisciplinary animal story. The historiography that is presented, while addressing general drifts in Canadian and international history with respect to animals, tends to look at what historians from the two sub-disciplines within history (environmental and race/ class/gender) have contributed to the animal story.

Not taking into account modern secondary historical work outside the two subsets tends to be a problem in articles dealing with domestic animals, especially when any approach to the subject of animal agency arises. Articles of this nature often present an underdeveloped appreciation of the lives of animals and of how and why the domestic creatures existed in the form they did. Why were some cows labelled as beef animals only, for example? What was a milk cow? Were conditions different for the two? Contemporary comments are sometimes used to illustrate human understanding of the animals and to explain animal lives. Such quotes, however, often have little to do with the subject at hand. Some simply deal with the costs incurred because of the animal. One, designed to show empathy for horses, only refers to a cow and calf and not to a horse at all. Some attention to what historians have written outside the environmental, race, class, gender subdisciplines of history would have enriched these articles immensely. Less...