susan nance historian

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[susannance]

Happy to announce that I've put together the first college textbook of historical primary sources for animal history. Animals in Nineteenth-Century America: A History in Documents will be published by Broadview Press later this year.

One thing that is great about a project like this is how much I learn in putting it together. I got to know historical creatures-from mosquitos to deer to snakes to celebrity horses-in every corner of 19th century America, not to mention the people they contended with.

P.S. I have another animal history textbook in the works for... ca. 2028.

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I am delighted to say that I am part of a team that has founded and just launched Animal History. Published by University of California Press, it's the first scholarly journal dedicated to research and reviews in the history of animals and human-animal relationships. Before now, new research articles in our broad field have been scattered in all sorts of subfield, topical, thematic, or regional history journals. Animal History is designed to bring all that work together as the leading publication venue for the field. We are open to work addressing all geographic regions, species, and time periods, from the late Paleolithic era to the early 21st century.

We've needed a journal like this for fifteen years -- finally, here it is!

Good news: Issue no. 1 is FREE.

Pictured here is our advert that appeared in last year's program for the American Society for Environmental History annual meeting. Note the line on the bottom -> Now open for submissions: animalhistory.scholasticahq.com...

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I have just co-edited with Jennifer Marks (University of Iowa) a collection of research chapters documenting moments in US history in which animals were in crisis.

Inspired by the throes of the recent global pandemic, Bellwether Histories: Animals, People, and US Environments in Crisis asks: For how long have we imagined that we could harm animals without harming ourselves?

Vanessa Bateman's chapter on Wyoming's "elk problem" is open access here

from the jacket: A multispecies history of the globalized United States, Bellwether Histories reveals how animals have been ensnared in colonialism, capitalism, and environmental destruction as human decisions created and perpetuated untenable and unequal interspecies relationships. The collection's authors explore how people misunderstood or ignored animal crises precipitated by habitat destruction and population declines, sudden dependence on human aid, shifts from freedom to captivity, or subjection to overextended management systems.

Chapters address a range of themes, including the links between antislavery and anti-animal-cruelty advocacy; how cattle, horse, and pig behavior shaped human life and technology; and the politics of caring for and trafficking wild animals. This volume interrogates the history of animal disposability and its ideological twin in US history, human exceptionalism—the anthropocentric myth that people could harm animals without harming themselves.

Today's mass extinctions and ecological breakdowns ensure deadly zoonotic pandemics and global warming will harass us far into the future. Bellwether Histories looks back at how animals have been warning us of our collective fate and asks why they were so seldom heard.

visit the book at University of Washington Press

for more of this kind of stuff see my cv

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I asked the ChatGPT bot to write a poem about a fictional greyhound named Misty.

It decided that she has "grace that can't be bought" and that she "knows her worth." Is this a pro-racing or anti-racing poem, and why so?

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This is an ex-racing dog named Nitro, captured on video in 2012 (or perhaps earlier) while playing. Like many greyhounds, he digs in the dirt, then spins, then freezes, then runs a lap, finding a way to express behaviors related to running and capturing prey--adapted to the back yard. Since the late 1980s, many tens of thousands of racing greyhounds at American tracks found too slow or injured to turn a profit were adopted by people who kept them as household companions. In the digital age, those adopters documented their dogs' behaviour in great detail by way of email lists and discussion boards, Facebook and Instagram posts, YouTube videos, iPhone photos, and other digital sources. Taken together, all those greyhound people produced an avalanche of information about the changing behaviours of greyhounds beyond the limitations of the dog track.

To historians, this is a great opportunity but also an overwhelming one. We have almost no historical records documenting the lives of historical dogs before the internet and mobile device age. Now, animal historians need to make use of these abundent but fragile sources while we can, before they are deleted from cyberspace or lost on old hard drives that end up in the e-waste recycling bin.

This video is one of the sources that inspired my latest piece, "Who is a Greyhound? Reflections on the Nonhuman Digital Archive," which appears in a new book Traces of the Animal Past: Methodological Challenges in Animal History.

visit the book at University of Calgary Press

for more of this kind of stuff see my cv

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“Buckaroos at Cabin,” Carl Fleischhauer, photographer. October 1979. Pictured: Tex Northrup, Carl Fleischhauer (ethnographic project photographer, top right), Myron Smart, Theodore Brown, Mel Winslow, Leslie Stewart, Fred Steward, Henry Taylor, William Smock, Clay Taylor.

How Can We Represent the Diversity of the Ranching West?

In finding and curating the collection of sources in the Broadview Sources Series title Ranching and the American West I looked at hundreds of primary sources about rural life in the west, and the people, lands, and animals there. That process thus presented some serious dilemmas. There are countless items available, especially for much-studied topics like cowboys, ranching, and the West. Which assortment of sources could I assemble that would accurately represent the rural West in 1790 or 1890 or 1990? There is no single answer to that question. A dozen historians would choose a dozen different combinations of items and we would all be right, just emphasizing different elements of the past.

In planning Ranching and the American West, I thought about what questions I could pose and answer for students that would be different than a narrative textbook, a lecture, or single primary source like a memoir. One goal I was determined about was that students would understand the mythology of the West—stoic cowboys and wild horses with manes blowing in the wind kind of stuff—but also what life was actually like for the diverse population there, including cattle and horses. (Yes, I included cattle and horses in my idea of “who” lived in the West. I did so knowing that, in order to avoid a book 500 pages long, I had to largely exclude prairie dogs, bison, wolves, elk, ticks, and others – even here there were difficult choices to make.)

An important goal was to show students glimpses of the western past that give a sense of the lived reality there, in all its glory and ingloriousness. Photographs proved especially important since they revealed what people actually looked like in a variety of historical settings—when they were tired and distracted, or working hard, or hoping to look presentable in public on rodeo day. Since textual sources tend to privilege middle and upper-class white, male voices, photographs are also a crucial way to see the diverse reality of Western history. They make Hispanic and Indigenous People especially present in the book, while asking students to consider the power disparities that nonetheless persisted by considering who is pictured, how so, and why so.

Here was a perfect excuse to show students images from one of my favorite collections at the Library of Congress, “Buckaroos in Paradise.” Part of the American Folklife Center collections, it contains hundreds of photographs, drawings, and other records of ranch life collected by a team of historians, anthropologists, folklorists, archaeologists, and photographers in Nevada’s Paradise Valley between 1978 and 1980. Their aim was to document “the Nevada cowboy, the buckaroo, presenting a realistic vignette of the cowboy in American social history,” as the collection description explains. Some of the ranches they documented were founded by Basque immigrants to the US who employed ranch hands from local settler communities and the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Western Shoshone Tribe, members of whom had English surnames like Brown, Smart, and Northrup.

The American Folklife Center team especially focused on labor issues, taking many photographs and conducting interviews with ranchers and their hired men, asking about and documenting their work with horses and cattle. They also created detailed drawings and photographic studies of tools and work spaces, such as the inside of the ranch house or the equipment at a far-flung bunkhouse where men stayed when working on remote sections of range for extended periods. The collection defies the myth of the cowboy as uniformly white and solitary, while speaking to many Americans’ romantic fascination with cowboys and ranching nonetheless.

As a child of the 1970s myself, I will be honest: the faded Kodachrome look of the old slides in the “Buckaroos in Paradise” collection was central to the appeal of these images for me. They remind me of happy times in my own past when I was surrounded by people wearing those same haircuts and work clothes. My dad was an archaeologist. Many summers I visited his archaeological digs in rural Kentucky, hanging out with grad students and faculty researchers, all of whom labored in close contact with the land, soil, and weather, just like ranch families and their hired men in Nevada did in those years, and still do.

Was it a bit subjective to choose historical sources grounded in my personal history in a rural place? Nope. Every historian’s view of historical sources and the past is shaped by their own experience and their own scholarly decisions about what aspects of the past matter today. The work of history is an ongoing conversation. It requires a diversity of sources and historians in order to approximate the whole past.

In Ranching and the American West, photographs from the “Buckaroos in Paradise” collection appear just after excerpts of interviews conducted around the same time with Mexican-American families at Texas’s famous Kenedy and King Ranches. That text included ranch women discussing the division of labor, men explaining when and how they learned to ride and rope, and other facts of daily life that contrasted with some of the settler accounts of ranching that appear elsewhere in the book. My hope was that students would use what they learned from the Texas source immediately before to read between the lines of the Nevada “Buckaroos in Paradise” photographs. I ask them to think not only about what they do see in the collection, but also what they suspect might be missing. Some of the most interesting primary sources, after all, are those that don’t seem to have all the answers and raise new questions.

this item reposted from the Broadview Press blog

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Ranching and the American West: A History in Documents

My latest is a textbook of historical sources exploring the history of the rural American West.

My goal for this book was to help students understand both the mythology of the cowboy West and the raw, lived reality of this diverse region, its people, animals, and land. So, I was especially delighted when one of the 'blurb' writers for the book's cover, Jeffrey D. Means at the University of Wyoming, called the book a "frighteningly accurate ... examination of one of the nation’s iconic businesses." Indeed, frighteningly accurate was just what I was going for! If you've studied the lived history of the American West from historical sources, perhaps you know what I mean?

Here’s the dust jacket summary:

The transformation of the American West is one of the key topics in the study of both US history and global environmental history. The role of ranching in the West is also central to the growing field of animal history. This volume covers the periods between the early Indigenous acquisition of horses in the eighteenth century, to the introduction of Hispanic horsemanship techniques and market cattle in the “Old West,” and finally to the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century ranching families sustaining their ways of life.

The documents in this volume reveal not simply the human past but also the distinct histories of cattle, horses, and the land. Readers will explore intersecting themes of capitalism and beef, environmental change, rural labor, and gender and racial politics as debated by westerners themselves, as well as the meaning and power of the cowboy myth in American life. The introduction incorporates recent scholarship and provides a fresh look at this key topic in American history, while informative headnotes and rich annotations help orient the reader within the historical sources.

visit the book at Broadview Press

for more of this kind of stuff see my cv

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* Rio, previously known by the racing name Mighty Rugged, now lives in Italy. Photo by Robin Olive Reich taken at the Canidrome on November 16, 2018.

The Future Of Greyhound Advocacy & Adoption

The dog racing industry in the United States is in serious decline, with few tracks remaining. Advocates and adopters are now looking to Australia and Ireland for their rescue work.

Greyhound adoption has been part of the companion animals landscape in North America since the early 1990s but now has reached a turning point. The 12 dog tracks in Florida closed this past year after voters approved (69-31%) the 2018 Florida Constitutional Amendment 13, outlawing commercial greyhound racing and leaving only five American venues to hold live dog races. Two tracks in Arkansas and Iowa have announced “wind down” schedules whereby they will cease holding live dog races by the end of 2022.

Meanwhile, a bill banning commercial dog races nationwide has begun winding its way through the federal legislative system as HR 3335, also known as The Greyhound Protection Act. Whether that last bill is ever signed into law or not, the greyhound racing industry seems to be on its last legs. Just two other tracks in West Virginia are hanging on, while the network of dog breeders and trainers that has supported commercial racing nationwide have mostly ceased breeding new litters, sold off their stock, and closed up shop, since there is not a critical mass of tracks left to support their businesses any longer.

For those who breed, race, and manage the National Greyhound Association (NGA) registry of racing greyhounds, this is a terrible moment. Since commercial dog tracks were first legalized in 1934, greyhound breeders have produced hundreds of thousands of dogs to serve the track network. Greyhound farms were generally located in rural areas of states like Kansas, Oklahoma, or Florida. Industry participants included a number of multi-generational families who bred and sold or contracted dogs to kennel operators at the tracks as a kind of agricultural work. Others founded breeding farms as a mid-life career change, investing in some farmland, erecting dog runs and a few outbuildings, then competing for contracts at the highest paying track they could achieve. Either way, although they were independent business owners competing to produce winning dogs and land lucrative kennel contracts, collectively they operated within a close-knit community of people united by their labor in picking, breeding, and training dogs represented by the one hundred-year old NGA registry. The end of the commercial track network means the end of that community, in large part, as people retire from the business or turn to other kinds of work.

For the greyhound adoption community that coalesced in the 1990s, it is a time of mixed feelings and finding new goals. Greyhound adoption was essentially non-existent until some sporadic adoptions of greyhounds from dog tracks beginning in the 1970s and early 1980s. Before that, dogs found to be too slow or unwilling to chase a lure were euthanized by breeding farm operators on rural properties where the number of pups killed over the decades is impossible to know. If they made it to a “Greyhound Park,” as the tracks were called, most dogs raced one, two, perhaps three years before being graded out and euthanized by kennel operators. A minority were returned to farms to breed the next batch of racers.

Within the industry, many people were certain that greyhounds must be killed when no longer financially productive. The cost and effort of adoption or simply putting a greyhound “out to pasture” for five, seven, or nine years was something individual owners would not take on. Others in the industry suspected that since greyhounds lived only in institutional, group housing situations characterized by strict routines and no contact with the outside world, it would be unlikely to retrain them for life as a household companion. Still others were reflexively suspicious of outsiders having any input on the management or disposition of ex-racers, or worried that the proliferation of greyhounds as companion animals might destroy the breed’s mystique — people would come to realize that greyhounds were dogs like any other.

Indeed, for decades NGA greyhounds carried a dangerous reputation as a muzzle-wearing killer, driven by unchanging instinct and harsh training to seek out and kill any small animal. An early history of greyhound adoption written by adoption pioneer Joan Dillon in Celebrating Greyhounds magazine recounted how, between the 1930s and 1970s, some critics of dog racing believed that greyhounds were dangerous to children and a threat to public safety. Racers would never adapt to new settings or new expectations about how to interact with people or other animals, so should be subject to a breed ban. Adoption was slow to take root due these kinds of limited understandings of how dogs can be rehabilitated or retrained. Certainly, many kinds of dogs held in shelters in those years were burdened by such faulty ideas. Over the last fifty years, our knowledge about how dogs perceive the world, how they learn and change over time, and how they can be rehabilitated has grown immensely.

Thereafter, a community of adopters and a network of greyhound adoption groups in the United States and Canada developed due to two crucial trends. First, the culture of companion animal keeping on the continent continued shifting toward a conception of dogs as not simple property or working animal, but family members. That was a consumer trend that began in earnest around the turn of the twentieth century and today has produced what social scientists call “multi-species” families, as fewer people choose to have children or live in traditional, heteronormative nuclear family situations. Second, greyhounds began appearing in public as companion animals at adoption events, or just going for a walk in the neighborhood, gaining a new reputation as gentle, sensitive, funny, and visually striking.

Indeed, greyhounds themselves should be given ample credit for the fact that greyhound adoption quickly became a well-known aspect of the companion keeping landscape. Still, they needed help from people willing to challenge the status quo at greyhound tracks and farms. Early adopters like Joan Dillon had begun in the 1970s and 1980s by asking at the track kennel on an ad hoc basis if she could take away or buy “used-up” racers. Within a decade, early adopters and supporters began founding non-profit, volunteer-run organizations that developed systematic relationships with specific track kennel operators and farms to save healthy greyhounds from euthanasia. Groups sprouted up everywhere across the US and Canada.

By 1998 there were an estimated 200 adoption groups that had found homes for many thousands of dogs. They set up networks of foster homes for ex-racers just off the track, where greyhounds could begin learning about life outside the industry and become more likely to be successfully adopted later. Volunteers, including the venerable “adoption coordinator” in each group, devised criteria for vetting potential adopters, evaluating “home check” visits and adoption applications, as well as other protocols for providing after-adoption advice and support to new greyhound guardians. A rich culture developed in the community dedicated to discussing greyhound habits, needs, breed-specific health issues, and retraining best practices. All these grass-roots, volunteer-run ventures, and the few dog tracks that had their own adoption programs, were united by dedication to the breed. What’s more, people could be quite fanatical about it, adopting many dogs over the decades. Greyhounds are like potato chips, as the saying goes. You can’t have just one!

Still, there were arguments about how and why this was all taking place. “Are you PR (pro-racing) or AR (anti-racing)?” is a question that has preceded many interactions among greyhound advocates and adopters. Indeed, the adoption community is a politically diverse one, characterized by many open arguments and uneasy alliances. From the perspective of pro-racing adoption groups—some members of which are also current or aspiring “owners” of one or two racing greyhounds themselves, which makes them investors of a sort—the end of the industry means the end of NGA registry. This is unacceptable because PR adopters seek to continue adopting ex-racers, whom they believe to be far superior to greyhounds registered by the American Kennel Club, the unregistered greyhounds bred by farmers as rural coyote hunters, and certainly other breeds of sighthound. They find it exasperating that other greyhound lovers—anti-racing adopters—would profess such love for the breed, yet seek to destroy the breeders who supply greyhounds who become companion animals.

Anti-racing adopters counter that they are “rescuing” greyhounds from an inherently exploitative industry that cuts corners at the expense of animal welfare at every turn. They see themselves as “cleaning up the mess” people in the industry create by breeding too many dogs and having no practical plan or funding for their lives after age five, or if seriously injured on the track. They understand that the NGA registry will become very small or possibly go extinct. Still, greyhounds will exist in some form, so it is okay to make this sacrifice to save suffering in future.

Meanwhile, on the few discussion boards and social media pages where PR and AR greyhound people do talk to one another, whether one uses the term “retire” or “rescue” to refer to adoption is symbolic of one’s position in this debate. Caught in the middle are crucial neutral adoption groups who decline to make statements for or against dog racing as a way to preserve their access to kennel operators and greyhound farm owners who control the supply of dogs. With some regularity, industry insiders and pro-racing adoption groups have withheld greyhounds coming off the tracks from any adoption group or individual adopter they believe opposes dog racing or is formally neutral but suspected of working with anti-racing groups.

With the industry in the United States almost gone now, resentments remain, but the argument about whether greyhound racing in the United States should continue is largely moot. How will greyhound adoption groups and the vast number of greyhound lovers in North America respond?

Some groups have chosen to disband. For example, non-profit Detroit group Michigan Retired Greyhounds as Pets (MI ReGAP) was one of a number of state-based “ReGAP” groups in the U.S., and was known as one of the most staunchly anti-racing groups on the continent. Founded in 1994, they were active in adoption for twenty years, and claim that 1,800 dogs passed through their hands. When the dog tracks that had been supplying ex-racers to them closed, the group briefly transitioned to finding homes for other kinds of dogs, then ceased handling adoptions at all around 2017 and appear to be dormant now.

Others groups have pivoted to become sighthound rescues with a more global outlook, although not without raising some dilemmas. The non-profit Greyhound Pets, Inc. (GPI) in Woodinville, Washington, for instance, houses their greyhounds at a recently-constructed kennel and in foster homes, traditionally bringing in dogs from the many tracks in Florida. Seeing the eventual fate of the industry and fulfilling a broader mandate to help sighthounds of different backgrounds, about six years ago they began bringing in lurchers (greyhounds crossed with various hunting dog breeds) from Ohio-based American Lurcher Project and non-NGA sighthounds from rescue groups in South Korea and Dubai.

In one especially notable “haul,” GPI volunteers participated in the rescue of dogs retrieved from the dreaded Canidrome dog track in Macau, a former Portuguese colony and gambling city in China. The track was ordered closed with 500 dogs living in barren, concrete cells on site—dogs of every age, many in terrible physical and psychological condition; the formally neutral GPI collaborated with a global consortium including anti-racing, neutral, and pro-racing greyhound adoption groups led by local advocacy group Anima Macau. Teams of volunteers raised many thousands of dollars and descended upon the old Canidrome kennels to oversee each dog’s (often extensive) necessary veterinary treatment, while beginning their re-socialization. Although Anima Macau found a few adoptive homes right in Macau, for the rest it was necessary to ferry dogs to Hong Kong, ten or fifteen dogs at a time, then fly them to waiting volunteers in Australia, the United States, and around Europe.

Is this the future of greyhound adoption? A large community of greyhound adopters resides in North America. The largest remaining dog racing industries are in Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. There, adoption programs cannot find enough homes for all the dogs discarded by the trade, and much of the public believe greyhounds are vicious or otherwise unsuitable as household companions (as was the greyhound’s reputation in the U.S. some decades ago). If an adopter in, say, Los Angeles, takes in an ex-racer imported from Australia, is that a tacit endorsement of Australian racing and its many well-documented animal welfare problems? What are the ethics of global “rescue” efforts that circulate dogs from the regions of the globe where they are born to places where there are people willing to take them in and bear the financial burden of their care? What are the welfare implications for dogs asked to travel long distances in this global traffic? As greyhound adoption has become globalized, these are questions that greyhound people, whether PR or AR, will need to contend with.

This blog by me is reposted from the Faunalytics guest blog, with thanks.

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Winner: Thomas J. Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary and Cultural Studies of the Western Literature Association

Rodeo: An Animal History

My most recent research project is a book-length study of North American rodeo animals since the late 19th century, and the larger populations of horses and cattle from which they emerged. This project takes my questions about how modernity has shaped animal life, human life, and the environment to the North American West and beyond. It asks how it was that to be "Western" in the 19th and 20th centuries was, in part, about demonstrating particular kinds of relationships to nonhuman animals and the land. This study thus brings together the fields of animal, environmental, consumer, and entertainment history.

This research has been kindly funded by the Bill Lane Center for the West at Stanford University, the University of Wyoming American Heritage Center, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the University of Guelph.

visit the book at University of Oklahoma Press

for more of this kind of stuff see my cv

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* A famous postcard of Chester Byers busting at the Pendleton Round-Up, a decade after numerous "bans" on the practice. 

Calgary’s 2019 Stampede is over and here is the tally: six horses dead in the chuckwagon races with a number of other horse injury “incidents” having taken place there. One of these was so publicly egregious that, to protect the races, Stampede officials felt compelled to ban chuckwagon driver Chad Harden from the competition permanently. This pattern of tragedy, public outcry, and incremental reform is old as rodeo, a sport whose community is far more self-aware and resilient than many people may realize.

Why do so many Calgarians and Stampede officials support the routinely-deadly “chucks”? Why won’t the Stampede’s own Animal Care Advisory Panel (formed in 2010 to manage animal treatment and serve the Stampede’s publicity goals) or the University of Calgary veterinarians engaged with the Stampede persuade event officials to phase out chuckwagon races that they know will harm horses? Is it a blind faith that the chronic “accidents” will somehow not occur next year? No. Everyone, including the adrenalin junkies who participate in the races, know the sport cannot be made safe since that would defeat its purpose.

Rodeo sports in the form of community-sponsored competitions featuring various riding and roping events have been with us for about one hundred and thirty-five years. Generally speaking, they have flourished as live performances of the violence in western history, with livestock standing in for Indigenous peoples, wild animals, and the land, and of the struggles of settlers to take control by any means necessary. Rodeo became a theatre of the myth that to be truly western, one had to do difficult things that others—city people, effete easterners, squeamish tenderfoots—would not. Or chose not to. Rodeo committees thus included show-stopper events like chuckwagon racing to promote ticket sales with claims to offering the most incredible and dangerous action in the arena.

The Stampede’s loyalty to chuckwagon racing today makes further sense if we go back to one of rodeo’s most-popular timed events and original controversies: steer busting. At the turn of the twentieth century it challenged rodeo people to find a way to adapt to hostile public contexts just enough to survive and keep going. Look at most rodeo histories and you won’t find explicit descriptions of what steer busting did to steers, just that it was “too hard on the stock,” so was “banned” in many places. To bust a steer, competitors on horseback chased down and roped around the horns a three or four-year old steer weighing around five hundred pounds. Once lassoed, the rider would pull the rope along one side of the steer while directing his horse to the other. The rope, anchored at the horns, would wrap behind the rear legs, “tripping” the steer and spinning him in the air until he landed on his head, dazing or knocking him out so that he would be more easily tied by the dismounting rider.

For steers at the tournament grounds, beyond any mental and physiological stress produced by fear, inability to graze, lack of water, overheating, or physical exertion, a minority also suffered broken horns, damaged or broken limbs, and occasionally a broken neck. Many died right in the arena as the crowd looked on. How many died is impossible to know, although the inevitability of it was plainly built into the regulation of the sport in many places like this: “Rule 6—If the steer is killed, that run and tie shall not be counted, and the party shall have chance at another steer.”

Animal advocacy organizations, members of the public, and eventually stockmen (whose cowboy employees practiced on and crippled their market herd) complained to rodeos that included busting. In 1907, an official of the Wyoming Humane Society spoke for many when he called steer busting, “a relic of barbarism … entertainment belong[ing] to a dead period of western life.” Hence, between about 1903 and 1909, laws seeming to ban steer busting appeared across the West to calm public anger.

Thereafter, near urban centers, SPCA or Humane Society officials dutifully appeared at some cowboy tournaments to enforce the law. In fact, reluctant as they were to cause controversy that would have them blackballed by rodeo officials, mostly they just looked for diseased stock or shot any animals injured on site. One noted with regret at the time that, in truth, the laws “were insufficient to cover the many diversified abuses at such exhibitions,” such that rodeo people could affect the appearance of self-regulation and reform while still giving the audience and competitors what they wanted.

Steer busting still goes on, of course, at private ranches, early morning slack rodeo competitions, or baldly out in the open at Cheyenne Frontier Days where the rodeo committee caters to local interests. You won’t see steer busting at the Calgary Stampede, though. Back in the 1920s, officials decided to instead promote chuckwagon races, a sport native to the Canadian prairies. They had tried steer busting briefly, received too many complaints, so replaced it with steer decorating competitions in which competitors jumped off a running horse to tackle a steer merely to “decorate” one horn with an elastic band bearing a small flag.

At elite levels, rodeo events are controlled by small groups of competitors and officials, dedicated to their sports and reluctant to be seen to be bowing to public pressure. The broader rodeo community, raw from decades of criticism, humors them. Yet, after the show, in the truck driving home, plenty of barrel racers and bronc riders will tell you they don’t like the chuckwagons and the bad publicity it brings, but that they keep quiet out of loyalty to a sporting community they love.

* this post initially appeared at NiCHE Canada

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This is not Greasy Sal. But she may have looked like this bronc, Calgary Stampede’s Steel Grey, pictured here in 1928. I have not yet found a photograph of Greasy Sal, although she was working as an “outlaw bronc” as part of the Stampede’s bucking string in the late 1920s.

My latest article is about Greasy Sal. It gives a preview of chapter 2 of my forthcoming book, Rodeo, Animals, and the Land with Oklahoma University Press. In the article, I tried an experiment in writing the history of rodeo sports: What if we look not at the famous buckers, the historical equine celebrities of rodeo like Steamboat or Midnight, but at the work-a-day, long forgotten buckers? What does rodeo look like when we follow a horse like Greasy Sal, whose life is barely recorded in Stampede business records and whose image seems not to have survived the passage of time?

This photograph is housed at the wonderful archives of the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta.

The article: “Who Was Greasy Sal? Outlaw Horses and the Spirit of Calgary in the Automobile Age,” Histoire sociale/Social History 49, no. 99 (June 2016): 371-89.

for more of this kind of stuff see my cv

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Here is my new book Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma published as a Pivot title with Palgrave Macmillan in Fall 2015

the blurb I wrote for the book: The concept of 'modernity' is central to many disciplines, but what is modernity to animals? Susan Nance answers this question through a radical reinterpretation of the life of Jumbo the elephant. In the 1880s, consumers, the media, zoos, circuses and taxidermists, and (unknowingly) Jumbo himself, transformed the elephant from an orphan of the global ivory trade and zoo captive into a distracting international celebrity. Citizens on two continents imaged Jumbo as a sentient individual and pet, but were aghast when he died in an industrial accident and his remains were absorbed by the taxidermic and animal rendering industries reserved for anonymous animals. The case of Jumbo exposed the 'human dilemma' of modern living, wherein people celebrated individual animals to cope or distract themselves from the wholesale slaughter of animals required by modern consumerism.

This is my first book-length publication with a trade press, and WOW did the process move quickly! The Pivot series has books go from manuscript to print in just a few months (rather than years) and was a bit of an experiment for me. The story I wanted to tell about Jumbo, consumers and the environment was a manuscripts of about 100 pages, so more than a journal article but not a full length academic title. So, I tried the Pivot stream and got this bit of research out in a refreshingly brief amount of time.

for more of this kind of stuff see my cv

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Philip T. Timms, photographer. "Parishioners assembled outside St. James' Church, 303 Cordova Street," ca. 1930. City of Vancouver Archives.

This photograph is an illustration in my new book The Historical Animal, published with Syracuse University Press in Fall 2015.

This collection brings together seventeen authors, with an Introduction by me. Together we explore new methodologies, ideas and stories for an intrinsically valuable history of animals, through which we also learn about ourselves.

Timms' photograph reminds me of: 1) how there has never been any purely human space in world history, ever; 2) a dog I knew as a kid, who looked a lot like this 1930s dog at the church, although we don't see dogs like her much anymore.

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The Troubling Origins of the Circus Elephant Act

It was big news recently when Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus finally bowed to public pressure and their accountants to announce that they will phase out live elephants in their traveling shows by 2018. The circus company is the last one to hold a large herd of elephants. Consequently, it appears that the two-hundred-year window in which Americans pioneered and popularized elephant acts as a part of circus entertainment is closing. Ringling Brothers and their parent company, Feld Entertainment, are pros, and there is no question they will refine their shows and prosper for decades to come.

So, how do we make sense of rise and fall of the elephant in circuses over the last two centuries? To me, the iconic performing circus elephant speaks not of nostalgia or innocence but of a nineteenth-century attitude toward the natural world that helped get us into the environmental crisis in which we find ourselves today. Balancing on a pedestal in a clown outfit, serving as a platform for a snarling tiger, or tooting awkwardly on a horn while the band played—the circus elephant said to spectators that, as the superior species, mankind could take anything (or anybody) they found in the world with impunity. The Elephant Brass Band pictured here was “funny” to audiences because elephants could not play horns properly, so the humor turned on their inability to measure up to human abilities. It was “wonderful” to audiences because it demonstrated human entitlement to remake animals into whatever people wanted them to be. 

“The Funny, Wonderful Elephant Brass Band,” Buffalo: Courier Litho. Co., 1899. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002719165/

In 1855, 1905, or 1955, such performances were grounded in a naively anthropocentric view of the world that suited the imperially acquisitive spirit of the era. Wealthy nations were busy discovering, measuring and cataloging new land, animals, plants, and peoples, and deciding how everything could be exploited for the financial and political gain of those in power or, later, a mass consumer economy. By this logic, nature was raw material just waiting for “improvement” through human manipulation. Circus people designed every aspect of their shows to satisfy ticket-buyers’ need for laughter, amazement, voyeurism, and self-satisfaction. They falsely told the public that elephants were naturally theatrical and native to the circus, and that they endorsed human motives and goals. The act was a kind of elephantine minstrelsy that, like the racist equivalent of the period—blackface—served to bolster the cultural, political and material power of the audience by silencing the beings thus represented.

Outside the circus ring, often before groups of newspaper reporters, circus trainers beat elephants into submission when they refused exhausting and painful training or became frustrated by chains and hobbles that limited their movement. Mentally anguished elephants often attacked or killed company staff, or made attempts at escape. Many circuses killed resistant elephants in ritualistic public executions that—no accident—mirrored and coincided with the horrific lynchings of black men in the American south. In challenging human control, an elephant unknowingly challenged not only the barnmen trying to goad him into a rail car or the exasperated trainer desperately commanding her to salute to the crowd before the applause stopped. Those elephants also unknowingly resisted the entire culture of human supremacy undergirding circus animal acts then, and even now.

Blackface is long gone, thankfully. The circuses gave that act up generations ago in order to keep their entertainment relevant. Could it be that the costumed circus elephant was a similarly political tool for the misrepresentation and domination of elephants and nature? I don’t mean to be flippantly provocative here, or to diminish the struggles of people who have endured systematic stereotyping and dehumanization in this century or earlier ones. Nonetheless, the troubling origins of these conventions for exploiting animals for entertainment expose the degree to which the happy circus elephant character emanates from a problematic historical context and is as arrogant a misrepresentation of elephants today as Zipcoon was of people of color a century ago. Now the public seems more interested in celebrating the intrinsic value of elephants. Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus acknowledges that fact. They will weed one more stereotype out of their repertoire and keep going.

As a species coming to terms with the limits of our power, it seems we may finally be ready to let elephants off the hook.

crossposted from The Johns Hopkins University Press Blog

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Thank You, Ringling Brothers

Last week Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circuses announced they will phase out live elephants in their traveling shows. I have been talking to many people about this announcement (see links below), and putting the news in historical context. Indeed, the decision to take elephants off the show at Ringling's is a long time coming. For Ringling Bros. it will result in better worker safety, lower overhead, and less public criticism. More broadly, I hope that this decision and the excellent, elephant-free circus entertainment with which Ringling will delight crowds hereafter will promote even broader acceptance of the idea that the human arrogance of taking and using anything (or anybody) we find in the natural world simply because we can is a relic of the 19th century.

KCRW Public Radio in Los Angeles

The Atlantic

Think Progress

The Guardian

WHYY Public Radio in Philadelphia

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I have been thinking a lot for a few years about how animals function as celebrities and do so differently than human celebrities. Animals don't know they are famous and they have no conception of the network of media, publicists and fans that makes celebrity possible. Yet many people are certain that some celebrity animals know and love their fans nonetheless.

Pictured here is a Professional Bull Riders bucking bull known as Charlie Bullware. He has a Facebook page through which his handlers communicate with fans and rodeo participants, and do so in the supposed voice of Charlie. Everyone involved in this knows that Charlie is just a bull, but still they all engage in the theatre of bull-fan interaction. Why so?

To try to figure this mystery out, I came up with a theory of animal celebrity, and wrote about it in a chapter called "A Star is Born to Buck: Animal Celebrity and the Marketing of Professional Rodeo." It appears in a great new collection edited by Michelle Gilbert and James Gillett called Sport, Animals and Society, published this year by Routledge.

for more of this kind of stuff see my cv

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This is the horse Highball, pictured in Chicago in 1904. In the nineteenth century many people spoke and wrote about racehorses as knowing competitors who relished the competition and sought to flatter their owners and bettors by winning.

So, who cropped this photo and when? That information is lost to history, but I think we can see here a visual representation of human work to imagine horses as modern individuals with ambition, fortitude and—somehow—knowledge of the human cultures that invented horse racing.

This image appears in my recent article, "Game Stallions and other 'Horseface Minstrelsies' of the American Turf," which appeared in the October 2013 issue of Theatre Journal.

visit the article at academia.edu

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