"Canine City: Dogs and Humans in Urban History"
Chris Pearson talks about the history of urban dogs and the role of dogs in modern urban history.
Chris Pearson talks about the history of urban dogs and the role of dogs in modern urban history.
In this article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Alexander R. D. Zahara and Myra J. Hird explore the ways in which western and Inuit cosmologies differentially inform particular relationships with the inhuman, and “trash animals” in particular. They compare vermin control practiced in Canada’s waste sites with the freedom of ravens to explore waste sites within Inuit communities, arguing that waste and wasting exist within a complex set of historically embedded and contemporaneously contested neo-colonial structures and processes.
This collection 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, while others examine the bodily intimacies of shared urban spaces.
Jonathan Woolley borrows the folkloristic, East Anglia figure of Black Shuck, a devilish hound, and connects it to a narrative of the Anthropocene based on the notions of inescapable mortality, deep time, and responsibility.