Animal City: The Domestication of America by Andrew A. Robichaud (review)

Andrew Robichaud's Animal City: The Domestication of America looks at the changing composition and location of urban animal populations. Whereas nineteenth-century cities teemed with livestock, astonishing foreign visitors, by century's end livestock had virtually disappeared and were soon followed by work horses as well. The animal city of the twenty-first century would be inhabited by different groups of animals than before. How and why this transformation occurred is the subject of Animal City.

Americans had always lived side by side with animals, and animals "were central to the way [they] understood the world" (p. 4). As livestock populations increased in size and density, Americans responded with regulation, removal, and humane concern. Changing relationships with animals were more important in the remaking of urban environments, culture, and political economy than technological changes and market forces. Robichaud argues that "without a history of the nineteenth-century animal city, we cannot fully explain why modern cities look the way they do" (p. 4).

Robichaud explores this transformation by looking at New York City and San Francisco, but he contends that his findings would describe most American cities. Seven chapters function as case studies, organized chronologically and linked by themes of animal geography, public-private government power, moral reform, and commercial expansion. Each provides a window into a moment in the animal history of the American city. The result is a wide-ranging story that offers a new interpretation of urbanization, state development, and environmental change in nineteenth-century America.

The first three chapters examine the relocation of urban animal industries. Chapter one studies the dairies in New York City, where cows were crowded in urban feedlots and fed with the swill of distilleries to encourage year-round milk production. Moral concern about pure milk and temperance gave way to more bureaucratic regulation; dairies, however, were pushed to the urban fringe, away from the supervision of city inspectors and humane reformers into more "natural settings" but without improving conditions for the cows or the purity of the milk. Chapters two and three examine the slaughterhouses of San Francisco. These were noxious, polluting businesses; in addition, driving livestock through the streets to the slaughterhouses was dangerous. The city government relocated the slaughterhouses to an area on the Bay away from the city, hoping that winds, tides, and currents would remove slaughterhouse pollution. This and later relocations removed livestock and also ethnic slaughterhouse workers from the city, out of public view but also from public consciousness and effective regulation. Managing animals shaped urban environments in material ways.

Chapters four and five focus on the establishment of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) in San Francisco and other cities. Animal management and animal welfare led city governments to extend policing and regulation by empowering private organizations like the SPCA. Chapter four looks at which animals did and did not get protected in San Francisco. Though lawmakers and enforcers were willing to protect animals, "they did not interfere in cases where certain human interests deemed essential would be compromised" (p. 133). Large enterprises and class status protected people from prosecution, enforcement fell heavily on the working classes, and animals outside the city got no humane oversight. Chapter five examines how the expansion of pet-keeping and pet culture shaped and was shaped by the SPCA. The case of a man prosecuted for using a dog to operate a cider press illustrates how traditional use of animals for work got branded as cruelty and remade "dogs exclusively as animals of leisure" (p. 160).

Relocating animals from work to leisure did not guarantee more humane treatment, and the last two chapters explain that visible, engaging public animals could deflect attention from invisible suffering. Chapter six examines how animal entertainment became less publicly cruel but was no less important as a way for people to think with animals and process social and cultural change. Chapter seven looks at the emergence...