Bellwether Histories: Animals, Humans, and US Environments in Crisis

Bellwether Histories is a collection of eight essays and an introduction. The aim of the book is to examine how “the ideologies of animal disposability and human exceptionalism” result in ecological consequences, animal extinctions, and an increased sense of human exceptionalism (ix). The essays cover topics such as understanding animals as property, capital, and infrastructure; they also address animals as ecologically damaging, endangered, and surplus. Five of the essays address issues related to animals commonly considered to be agricultural animals—livestock. One other essay discusses insects and birds with an eye to how they can provide ecosystem services for agricultural crops and livestock animals. Two of the remaining chapters focus on the lives and deaths of animals in zoos and one on the feeding of wildlife, using elk in 1914 Wyoming as an example.The introduction discusses mules used in coal mines in order to set the stage for understanding the “mutual but unequal vulnerability” shared by human and other animal beings. Looking at animal bellwethers helps us see how harming other animals usually results in harming humans and encourages us to understand how colonialism, capitalism, and human exceptionalism combine to create vulnerable animal beings. In chapter 1, “Interspecies Anticapitalism in English and American Humanitarian Writings, 1800–1850,” Joshua Abram Kercsmar takes up the “commerce in human and animal bodies” by discussing linkages between critiques and defenses of both the slave trade and the trade in animal bodies. Enslaved humans, livestock animals, and the horses laboring in the city streets were all understood as “living capital” (21). Many contemporaneous authors sought to change conditions for both enslaved humans and other animal beings so that they were no longer seen as “expendable property” (25). This was at odds with growing consumer demand, which depended on the labor and deaths of both human and animal beings. Horses are also central to Jennifer G. Marks's chapter 2, “Chicago's 1872 Equine Influenza Epizootic and the Evolution of Urban Transit Technology.” At the time horses were the main means of transporting humans and their goods. Their labor and lives were taken for granted. This changed when equine influenza spread throughout the city and movement stopped. This shock to the city's infrastructure showed both the shared vulnerability of horses and humans to disease and the myriad ways the modern city had evolved with and through horses. Humans had engineered the horse as “a form of biotechnology, an organic being for human use” (52). They constructed their cities and industries around that technology, creating an even stronger interdependence between horse and human, along with “mutual understanding and emotional bonding” (53). This emotional bonding, along with alternative power sources, “pushed horses farther away from being considered ‘living machines’ and toward recognition as empathetic, valuable beings who warranted better living and working conditions for their services” (61).This is very different from what happened in relation to cattle and pigs, though. Chapter 3, “Cattle and Blizzards: Lessons from the Big Die-Up in 1880s Montana,” and chapter 7, “The Destructive Ecology of Human-Pig Relations in Iowa since 1950,” by Susan Nance and Mary Trachsel, respectively, detail how human greed resulted in animal suffering and ecological devastation. Cattle paid the price for humans’ belief in “ecological autonomy” and the disposability of animal bodies when harsh winter conditions took their lives (76). The cattle were present in Montana as part of an intentional colonial takeover of Native American lands, but they weren't adapted to the place. Pigs in Iowa, on the other hand, did not have to adapt to the place as they are confined in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). While they were not in danger of dying in a blizzard, their presence threatened the place in which they lived. Fertile prairies were converted to monoculture crops of corn and soybeans in order to feed pigs and other livestock animals. The pigs’ manure continues to pollutes land, air, and water, and pigs and people remain susceptible to the outbreak of diseases that can spread quickly through the high volume of animals.In chapter 5, “Animals, Infrastructure, and Empire,” Jessica Wang discusses how humans used insect and bird introductions in Hawai‘i in an attempt to protect crops and cattle. Used as “biological control agents,” each species introduction caused a “chain of consequences that perpetuated the colonial state's system of oversight and intervention” as experts tried to control animal mobility and ecologies (131–32).While there is no concluding chapter, the main message of the book seems to be that humans either ignore their interdependence with other animals or seek to control the conditions of that interdependence. Both approaches come with negative consequences, and we should learn from these past experiences in order to chart a better future.