The categories and the types of care we assign are very often tenuous and troubled in nature. The articles in this volume explore some of the intricacy, ambiguity, and even irony in our perceptions and approaches to “multispecies” relations.
Jean Langford discusses what happens “when species fall apart” in the relationships of care at primate and parrot sanctuaries. Care involves an improvised orchestration of social life—through spatial arrangements and regulation of movement—to facilitate often nonnormative, intraspecies, and cross-species intimacies.
Caring for one set of species at the cost of another is the subject of Amir Zelinger’s article about bird conservation and its implications for the life of cats in Imperial Germany.
Ursula Münster shows us in her essay on silenced and silent practices of avian care in a postcolonial conservation landscape of South India, that care is never innocent, it plays out within established hierarchies and power relations, and it can reinforce long traditions of imperialism and exclusion.
Schlangenlinien examines the history of the European Viper and the shift from extermination policies to those of protection and rehabilitation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Effective strategies for rat control based on ecology were invented in Baltimore in the 1940s. The program, however, did not last.
From the early exploits of Teddy Roosevelt in Africa to blockbuster films such as March of the Penguins, Gregg Mitman reveals how changing values, scientific developments, and new technologies have come to shape American encounters with wildlife on and off the big screen.
In this Special Section on the Green Economy in the South, V. Corey Wright contributes to the debate about Tanzania’s Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) and the nature of decentralization. He argues that WMAs represent risk but also an opportunity for rural communities.
Susana Costa, Catarina Casanova, and Phyllis Lee present a study of the obstacles to women’s participation in conservation strategies associated with Cantanhez Forest National Park (CFNP), in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa. The findings revealed that the women felt the Park was responsible for malnutrition in the communities due to damage of crops by wildlife.
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.
