S9E3: Taxonomies with Harriet Ritvo

Harriet Ritvo discusses animals and taxonomy, unfurling the ways in which animals are categorised scientifically and in everyday vernacular.  She unfurls what this might mean for how we know animals and the ways in which we understand and write their histories. 

Topics Covered:

•  how classification systems expose human values and power
•  why herd books matter for animal history and domestication
• scientific taxonomy versus vernacular categories 
•  naming rules, authority, and what counts as a “real” species boundary
•  how “native” and “invasive” change with politics and time
•  camels in Australia, wild horses, dingoes, and conservation trade-offs
•  Atlantic salmon in Kingston and the story of local extinction and restoration

Date Recorded: 20 April 2026

 Harriet Ritvo is the Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at MIT. She works in the fields of environmental history, the history of human-animal relations, British and British empire history, and the history of natural history. She is the author of numerous books , including The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard UP, 1997), The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard UP, 1987), and Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (Virginia, 2010). Her articles and reviews have appeared in a wide range of periodicals and she is an editor of the “Animals, History, Culture” series published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. She has a great deal of accolades and accomplishments, not least of which is being given the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Environmental History in 2020. Learn more about her here. 

 Featured: 

• The Platypus and the Mermaidby Harriet Ritvo
• The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age  by Harriet Ritvo
• Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History by Harriet Ritvo
• Sex and the Single Animalby Harriet Ritvo
• Forty years of embryo transfer in cattle by John F. Hasler
• After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America by E. C. Pielou
• Anthony Trollope
• A list in time: A story of how animals came to be categorized by Claudia Hirtenfelder
• The Violent Conservation of the European Wildcat by Virginia Thomas
• Compassionate Conservation with Daniel Ramp on The Animal Turn. 
• Kontihnawa:ra: Atlantic Salmon on Stones

 Animal Highlight: Taxonomies of Atlantic Salmon in Kingston

Quote: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved” – Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species.

The Animal Turn is part of the  iROAR, an Animals Podcasting Network and can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, LinkedIn,Blue Sky, and Instagram

Credits:

• Sponsor: Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E)
• Guests: Harriet Ritvo
• Host: Claudia Hirtenfelder
• Editing and Production: Claudia Hirtenfelder
• Episode Artwork: Rebecca Shen
• Content Creation and Support: Herre de Bondt and Carlo Salzani
• Technical Support: Christiaan Mentz
• Animal Highlight: Stones Walking Tour
• Sound Effects: Epidemic Sound
• Bed Music: Gordon Clarke
• Logo: Jeremy John

Support via:

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

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Transcript

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Cold Open Hybrids And Purity

Harriet Ritvo 0:00

This is another iROAR podcast. So they they're different genuses, not not even different, just different species, but bison and cattle will interbreed. And there's been some of that intentionally, you know, which like producing the beefaloes. But it turns out that the wild ones, if you go like to Yellowstone Park and you know, you drive around and you see them all over the place and they look like bisons and they act like bisons. But if you do their DNA, it turns out that quite a lot of them have a bit of cow in them, a bit of Bos Taurus. And presumably some of it might be because some of the animals were somehow came from herds that had been, you know, living in domesticated circumstances. But some of it probably was uh due to the agency of the animals themselves in in the years before the range was fenced in, when her, you know, be and before the buffaloes, you know, were were so decimated, where presumably they were okay with it. So uh so why make a fuss.

Welcome And Why Taxonomies Matter

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:28

I think I started in 2019, and uh here we are a couple of years later. Thank you so much for listening and supporting the show and leaving the reviews and the ratings and all of those things. I very, very much appreciate it. Uh I got an email from a fan uh just the other week's uh Sue Hurl. I apologize if I'm saying your surname incorrectly, Sue, who said that she had just celebrated listening to her 100th episode of the podcast. That's amazing. Thank you, Sue, for listening to the show. This is a shout-out to you and a shout out to all of you guys who take the time and the energy and the effort to listen to the show and to learn about and think about animals. Um, that's great. Thank you. Uh, today we continue talking about and thinking about animals and history. And we've covered pretty big concepts so far, kind of thinking about animals' cultural histories, modernity, and we continue on that trajectory today, talking about another really huge concept, uh, and one that's come up, I think, in every season, and that is taxonomies, the ways in which we categorize and think about animals. And this invariably comes up in the ways in which histories are written. Uh, I'm joined today with probably one of the first people to ever attempt and write an animal history in the way we think about it in animal studies, and that is Harriet Ritford. Her book, The Animal Estate, The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, was really quite instrumental in the early days of my PhD. So I'm very, very thankful to Harriet and her numerous essays that she's written about animals and history. If you haven't heard of Harriet, she is the Arthur J. Connor Professor of History at MIT. She works in the fields of environmental history and the history of human-animal relations, British and British Empire history, and the history of natural history. History, history, history. She is the author of numerous books, including The Platypus and the Mermaid and other figments of the classifying imagination, which we touch on a bit in this episode today, The Animal Estate, The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, as well as Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras, Essays on Animals and History, amongst numerous, many, many different articles and reviews and periodicals. She's also the editor of Animals, History and Culture. Harriet has a great deal of accolades and accomplishments, not least of which she was given the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Environmental History in 2020. We touch on a wide range of topics related to taxonomies, the ways in which humans and animals are kind of categorized alongside and with and through one another, and some of the implications this has for doing animal studies and writing animal histories. At the end of the episode, I return to the animal highlight where we're looking at animals in Kingston, which is where I did my PhD and was first introduced to the world of animals and geography and history. And uh I'll be focusing on Atlantic salmon in that highlight. So I hope you enjoy.

Meet Harriet And Classifying Imagination

Claudia Hirtenfelder 4:30

Hello, uh Harriet. Thank you so much for coming to the Animal Tone Podcast. I'm a bit starstruck to have you here. There's probably a few names that are as big as yours when it comes to thinking about animals and history. Uh, and the work you've done with regards to unpacking the animal turn has been quite amazing. Uh so thank you so much for joining us in the season focused on animals and history. I really, really do appreciate it. So today we're going to be speaking about taxonomies or taxonomies of difference and the ways in which they make an appearance in history, or I suppose can be used as methods to understand history. Uh, but you've written a lot. When I was preparing for this interview, I mean I'd read The Animal Estates, I've read a couple of your articles, but I read in one uh interview that you have written over 150 works. Is that correct? I have no idea. Oh my goodness, that's that's wild. How many books do you have on the bot now? Four. Four. And which is your favorite?

Harriet Ritvo 5:31

Probably my favorite is the one called The Platypus and the Mermaid and other figments of the classifying imagination. Classic classification is one of those things that looks very um kind of absolute and fact-based and so forth, and is extremely illuminating, but illuminating not just because of the order it imposes on the things that are classified, but for what it tells you about the value systems and perceptions of the people who are doing the classifying.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 6:07

In that book, did you include both real animals and fantastic animals? So I'm guessing movies.

Harriet Ritvo 6:12

Yes, yes, I talked a bit about sea serpents, for example, and unicorns.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 6:17

And do they appear close to like because this makes me think a little bit about was it one of Foucault's books where he started the book speaking about what he called, I think, a Chinese encyclopedia? And it blended a whole bunch of both fantastic and real creatures. And there was an interesting, I guess, taxonomy going on there in terms of organizing thought. So is that what you were looking at?

Harriet Ritvo 6:38

Well, no, not to um not not to criticize Foucault, but um the reason that sea serpents, for example, um showed up in this book is because in the 18th and 19th century they were observed by uh reliable witnesses. Now, looking back from our perspective, they were presumably observing something else, but people did not necessarily think they were um uh fantasies.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 7:07

So at the moment today, we could think about them as like the Luckness monster, I suppose. We could think about the Luckness monster as being a fantastical creature, but at the time, in those people's imaginaries, the Luckness Luckness monster was very much real.

Harriet Ritvo 7:20

I'm not sure about Lochness, but definitely sea serpents. Okay. And you know, there was some um attempt, for example, uh earlier European naturalists uh trying to think that rhinoceroses were the originals of unicorns. So unicor in the in a sense, they were saying unicorns might have been real. They weren't, they they weren't looking like people drew them, but and probably uh no one thinks that anymore.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 7:52

Well, okay, this is taking us really nicely into what we're going to be talking about today. But before we get into the full of that conversation, let's learn a little bit about you. How did you, yeah, what what career decisions did you make to find yourself writing about mermaids and animals in

Accidental Career Into Animal History

Claudia Hirtenfelder 8:07

history?

Harriet Ritvo 8:07

Well, all my career decisions were more or less accidents. All my training is actually not in history of science, but in English literature. And um when I came to MIT at the beginning of my career, MIT has two literature departments. One is in is called literature, and one is called, well, now it's called media studies, but at that time it was called writing. And I was in that one. And so that meant that you had to publish your parish, but it wasn't so clear what you had to publish. So instead of revising my dissertation, which was about agrarian themes and 19th century novels, I decided, and I had become uh unhappy with um, you know, the methods, the evolving methods in the field of literature. I th and I and more drawn towards history and history of science anyway, and I have a fair biology background. So I thought, well, I'll write a history book instead. And then I thought, well, history of what? And I like the 19th century and Britain and so forth. And it just came to me. I mean, partly because I've been the uh manager of cats for a long time, uh, partly because one of my uncles was a veterinarian who uh unorthodoxly uh used to uh conscript some of his young relatives to help in his clinic, and because I, you know, had a general interest in that kind of thing anyway. And so yeah, so uh that's how I came to it.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 9:45

And did you find it challenging to try and write about animals and history?

Harriet Ritvo 9:49

Well, I mean, as you know, writing is challenging, research is challenging, um, but and and certainly to do the kind of work that I've done, although you know, animal history and animal studies are very variable, so this may not be true for everybody, but you definitely have to enjoy reading not just scientific texts, but the kind of texts that breeders write for each other and you know breed books and uh and so forth. And uh I do like that.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 10:25

Yeah, no, I find I was I was speaking to someone just the other day about tax documents, and they're really boring, but they're really fantastic. So, I mean, boring, I mean today. I hate doing my taxes, but historically, tax documents are probably some of the most interesting. So, in people's imaginaries, tax just seems really boring, or something like a herd book. Why would you want to go through a herd book and look up the names of various creatures to understand how they came to breed with one another or where they were? But really, they tell you a whole bunch of different patterns of how we've come to be where we are today. Um, and I know you write about herdbooks in the animal estate as being a really important technology for how we understand domesticated animals today.

Herd Books And Human Family Stories

Claudia Hirtenfelder 11:08

Could you maybe walk us through that a bit? Why, what do herdbooks do when it comes to figuring out animals or thinking about where animals fit in our societies?

Harriet Ritvo 11:17

Well, herdbooks are just in a way the most concrete evidence that's still accessible about how um high-end breeders interacted with and thought about livestock, which of course, I mean, from the beginning of domestication, um, have been a significant uh the in a way the most economically significant interaction that people have had with animals. But also, and especially when you see the parallel between breed books and human genealogies. In fact, when the uh the baronetage and peerage that were published in England in the 19th century, for people, for aristocrats, they were referred to conversationally as stud books. Uh and and almost everything that people say about animals, even when they're talking about them in the most concrete possible terms, resonate with what they say about each other. So it's it's not I mean, there is such a thing as anthropomorphism, like when you talk about an arranged mating as a wedding. But a lot of things that people talk think about as anthropomorphism are really not. They're recognizing recognizing actual similarities one way and another between the way, well, the way animals are and the way people are, or sometimes the way people think about animals and the way people think about themselves. For example, if you compare what is considered desirable in a 19th-century breed book about different cattle breeds, for example, with the way Anthony Trollope describes his female heroines, you see that there's some kind of resonance there.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 13:11

Could you could you I I don't know what either of those, like what are they using similar words or well, basically Trollope describes his heroines physically, I mean not pornographically in any way.

Harriet Ritvo 13:22

He's, you know, of course, very a very restrained novelist in that way. But you can see that the that what's underlying the descriptions is basically, is this female going to make a good mother?

Claudia Hirtenfelder 13:38

But now, if we're thinking about what's outlined in herd books with, let's say, cows, a short horn or a horse herd book, and they're trying to see what would make a good mother or a and I think the stud books, there's there's a tendency to focus often on on, yeah. I mean, they've become even more kind of granular as time has gone by. But let's say the vocabulary that's used to describe a good mother in a a herd book and a potentially good mother in a novel, aren't those, I mean, you said they're both and potentially anthropocentric, but then you said that potentially they're just resonances. How do you how do you read those as resonances?

Harriet Ritvo 14:15

Well, no, I I I I I I just mean that in some in some way the agenda the underlying agenda is the same. Of the humans involved or also of the animals involved? Both. I mean, of course, they don't think that Trollope doesn't think that people should look like cats, but um there's also an underlying idea of what a good temperament is.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 14:45

Yeah, and they tend to be uh described in pretty gendered ways. Uh, even if you look today at the description of uh, you know, cows and bulls, for example, what is valued or privileged physically is very much based on sex. So it's not, I mean, motherhood is to some extent a temperamental descriptor. I mean, also physical, can she carry, etc.? But motherhood seems to go beyond just the pregnancy, whereas, you know, there's this huge focus on size of uh teets when it comes to cows, whereas with bulls, the amount of you know, the amount of description about the size of bulls and the size of um hawks is just you know overtly sexual. And that's continued through to today. You still see this in adverts uh descriptors about these animals that that seem to be an excess of the economic discussions.

Harriet Ritvo 15:35

And also, um, if the in the more informal exchanges that you see in like journals written for audiences of breeders, when they discuss things like females who will not cooperate with the male that's been chosen for them, they really uh use language that you can imagine a father using to his daughter who wouldn't marry the person he's chosen for her. Um I wrote I wrote an article about all that once called Sex in the Single Animal.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 16:08

So what explains those kinds of slippages? The the kind of using of the same descriptions for your daughter. Is that Ollie? No, that's Tony. Tony. Hi, Tony. Um what explains those kind of slippages when it comes to talking about the daughter versus the the cow?

Harriet Ritvo 16:27

Well, as I say, I mean, uh people have uh gendered understandings and uh they apply them whenever there's gender. There's a funny kind of paradox or paradox underlying a lot of you know academic discussion of human animal relations, or I should say human relations with other animals, since of course we are animals, where there's a tendency to set them apart as a subject. But on the other hand, um that that often involves not recognizing continuities.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 17:04

Is this continuities both in terms of discourse but also in terms of structures like tools and technologies used?

Harriet Ritvo 17:10

Let's stick to discourse, although, you know, since we are all mammals, we have a lot in common biologically and um and psychologically too. So, you know, sometimes, you know, sometimes thinking they're the same as us is right, and sometimes it's not.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 17:29

Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm thinking now just in terms of how you were talking about, you know, the applying of, let's say, gendered or sexist discourse to different groups of animals and people. I think sometimes you see the same technology kind of slipping between different groups that are being managed, right? So it could be something like a fence, or it could be um, I think uh in vitro fertilization, uh IVF was originally developed in cows, if I'm not mistaken, or it was an agricultural product that has now revolutionized uh, you know, human reproduction.

Harriet Ritvo 18:02

So there's there's yes, with with with some of the same problems because it can happen that there are too many people with the same father. With the humans? Yeah, yeah. No, that it it it has it even was in the news not too long ago that and I can't remember whether it was a doctor who was generous with his um sperm with with regard to his patients without telling them, or whether, you know, when people choose out of like a catalog and too many choose the same the same man uh donor for for father. But of course, if you have a lot of people, especially in a in a given area, with not knowing who their father is, then you know they can end up married to their half siblings and and things like that. And with with animals where where there isn't any um obscurity about it, it people do exp express the worry that in effect genetic diversity within a given breed will be will be reduced if the same uh excellent excellent uh bull or stallion or whatnot is used too often.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 19:16

It's it's interesting when you compare these next to one another, because you realize where we would be squeamish with something with regards to humans, we're not squeamish with regards to animals. And then this raises the question why? Why do why are we, you know, because it's it's not uncommon. I mean, yes, people, I think when it comes to breeding animals or domesticated animals are very aware. So that's why herd books are around, right? To make sure that the genetic diversity is maintained. That's why many zoo animals are killed to maintain genetic diversity. But at the same time, it's perhaps not uncommon to hear people uh having different dogs and cats breed who are not that far, you know, are relatively close related to one another. It's it's a problem in with most breeds, actually. So I'm no batting an eyelid when it comes to that. But in many, I think, Western societies, the idea of cousins having a baby together would get people very worried very quickly. So it's yeah, so there's these Actually, it's really only siblings that people really that are a legal problem. A legal problem, but socially, you don't think people would be like, oh, I'm married to my cousin or I'm having babies with my cousin? Or is this just a contemporary concern?

Harriet Ritvo 20:25

Uh I think I I think it's it's um uh yeah, relatively recent.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 20:32

Okay, interesting. So I think I've taken us off the rails a little. Um let's take two steps

What Taxonomy Does And Why

Claudia Hirtenfelder 20:38

back. Uh could you define for me what taxonomy is and why it's important when it comes to thinking about animal histories?

Harriet Ritvo 20:48

Well, how to classify animals is something that certainly well it I was gonna say it's been very important since people started to abandon the notion of separate creations for individual animals, but actually that's not right because uh Linnaeus believed in separate creations, but he was very uh big on on um on classifying, although most most of his classifications, his his his nomenclature has held up basically because for historical reasons, because he's the beginning, but but his his class classifications have mostly not held up except the ones that are not that different than Aristotle's thousands of years ago. The agenda of classification, I mean, part of it is just you know, you have to give things names if you in order to talk about them. And it would be nice if the names made sense in some way. But you know, one of one of the things that the early classifiers had to do was collect all the different names, including Latinate names. For the same the same creature or the same plant, because in different places, I mean, not just in different languages they have different names, but in some places the species boundaries were understood differently and so forth and so on. Um but you know, starting even with with someone like Buffon or Lamarck, and of course culminating with Darwin, classification is an expression of the historical evolutionary relationships of organisms. And so, you know, organisms in the same groups and subgroups have things in common, but the reason they have things in common is because they share at some level in the past descent from uh a common ancestor.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 22:52

I mean, we we take evolution kind of and evolutionary categorizations, I guess, for granted, or some of us take it for granted today, but you were talking there about the early classifiers. So at this time, what were other than species, were there other ways of classifying animals? So what was what was used? Well, as as there still, as there still are.

Harriet Ritvo 23:14

I mean, you know, the subspecific classification, which is subspe uh subspecies now, but we still have breed, as we were talking about, and we have race. And those terms have been around for a long time, as problematic, uh difficult to define looking backwards as they are now. Race was used as a category to describe different groups of animals? Yeah, yes. Um, in fact, they subgroups, especially of domesticated animals, they were in uh if they weren't formalized as breeds, or before that formalization was was common, they were often called land races. Um, you know, which recognized the fact that you know cows or sheep that lived in a certain area were apt to resemble each other just because that was who there was for the farmers to um breed them with.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 24:14

Okay, so for a complete novice who knows absolutely nothing about history and is trying to get a uh a uh timeline in their brain of what's happening here, when we're talking about uh breed, when does breeding start to take off in earnest?

Harriet Ritvo 24:31

Well, formalized breeding in the with with the infrastructure that we recognize now, the very end of the 18th century.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 24:38

18th century. And Linnaeus, when is Linnaeus starting to put together his He's in the middle of the 18th century? Okay, so all of these kinds of questions of how we categorize animals with a clear focus. I mean, Linnaeus was looking at wild and domesticated animals, but just trying to figure out how animals sit relative to one another in a kind of, I suppose, scientific lens is happening around this time. But prior to this, there were many ways of organizing.

Harriet Ritvo 25:03

I mean, like most things in history, they happen before people say they happen. So basically, breeding in the in a sense had been happening for hundreds of years before, but not kind of not formalized in breed societies and and breed books, especially for horses, since they're they're they're functional. The way you measure horses, the way you measure like cows and sheep is by what they produce. And so, well, sheep you can shear, but for cows, you know, it's not until until they're dead. But um for horses, it's it's racing, which is easy to measure, and and some other other kinds of um fun functions uh like that. And so that that kind of horse breeding was and of course horses are are are the most valuable animals also. So you you you see it you see it formalized first in horses, but you know, if you look, you know, you look back at least, at least in in Britain and Europe, um, you know, it's it's obviously been going on in some sense for a while, even if people were not documenting and and formalizing it in and giving it labels the way the way they subsequently did.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 26:24

I I guess I mean, are there other groups or ways of categorizing these animals outside of thinking about them according to breed and stuff? So I'm thinking here about, you know, I guess indigenous knowledge is a lot of uh historians will write about the arrival of colonizers in North America, for example, and how this wasn't only disruptive because they brought with them, you know, diseases and new animals that changed the environments, but that also they had fundamentally different understandings and they ordered the animals differently uh relative to humans, whereas the indigenous populations in North America, for example, didn't use, I suppose, breeding uh as the metric for how they understood animals.

Harriet Ritvo 27:04

Well, indigenous populations in in in what became the United States didn't have the range of domesticated animals that um uh and so I mean even even Europeans didn't recognize subgroups of wild animals. Uh, but but you can see there's a there's a I mean one of the things that I I talked about a lot in in my book was about competing taxonomies that people have.

Scientific Rules Versus Folk Categories

Harriet Ritvo 27:35

Scientific taxonomy is more more or less controlled by scientific bodies, although it took a while for it to settle down into the uh the well-regulated operation that it is today. You know, in the 19th century, there was even a discussion about whether the scientific name, you know, the person who first formally describes a species gets to name it. But there are rules for naming. And for example, you in the beginning you weren't, well, you couldn't name it after yourself. I think that's still true. But it was okay if Linnaeus named kind of unpleasant animals and plants after people he didn't like. You were supposed to use terms that were Latin or Greek, so you couldn't, it was it was transgressive to incorporate the like the indigenous name for an animal, even if it was an animal that lived in Africa or South America or Arab. And you weren't supposed to combine Latin and Greek. That is, if you had a Latin genus, you had to have a Latin species name. So all kinds of rules. But anyway, so scientific taxonomy is one set of things, and that's that's what's embodied in genus species names, or in, you know, kingdom phylum, class order family genus species that you learned in high school, or I did. But there's also vernacular taxonomy. For example, and this is straying a bit from animals, or maybe maybe not as far as you think. Now, Linnaeus had three kingdoms. He had animals, plants, and minerals. So minerals dropped out, but animals and plants stayed as the kingdoms. Now we have a bunch of kingdoms because there are several different ones for single-celled organisms. But the the first addition to animals and plants was fungi. Um and it turns out that genetically fungi are closer to animals and plants than plants. That is what that means is that long, long ago, very long ago, when you so animals and the origin of animals and plants, they split. And then later than that, although still a very long time ago, the ancestors of fungi split from the ancestors of animals. But if you go to the grocery store, you will not see mushrooms in the butcher case. So the vernacular understanding is that they're plants, even though in some in some way they're more like animals. But in the way that counts to most people, they're more like plants.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 30:13

Yeah, that's a really great example. I mean, with with the caveat that you've got increasing numbers of, let's say, vegan steaks that are made using mushrooms, because fungi are these incredible things that can be used to make just about anything. Um And maybe that's because they're they're a little meaty. Yeah, they're a little meaty. Like a lion's a lion's main mushroom is just absolutely delicious. Uh, that's a really great example. So if I understand you correctly, when we think about classification, there are multiple classifications happening in any given context at any given point in time. Uh, and sometimes they're competing and not necessarily in the same space. So there might be, you know, uh individuals or groups competing on the scientific classifications, but there's also potentially other classifications like the vernacular classifications where people blend together this knowledge. So you can know scientifically that a mushroom is not the same as a plant or an animal, but in your day-to-day life, you would kind of, you know, when you say plants and animals, you're just you're you're smashing mushrooms in there, and everybody understands. You know, it's like the folk knowledge, you know that everybody else knows what you're talking about.

Harriet Ritvo 31:24

Yeah, and the stakes are different. I mean, it it's important for scientists to understand what I've just been saying, but it's not so important for cooks. Or, like you can think of um, I don't know if you noticed for a while, a long time there was a taxonomic discussion about pandas. That is, were they raccoons or were they bears? And I mean, both are part of the order carnivora. So raccoons and bears are not all that far. I mean, farther, farther than us and chimpanzees, but not all that far apart as those things go. And so now it's been decided that they're bears. That's interesting. But I don't know, I don't know whether it matters to or to whom it matters.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 32:05

I think it troubles, it might be powerful because it's playing with, I guess, everyday imaginaries, right? So a lot of I think what animal studies scholars do are disrupting or challenging people's taken-for-granted assumptions. And I think when you you subvert some of these taken-for-granted imaginaries, you I think you start to question these classifications or question a little bit, you realize that they're not as fixed and everything isn't as determined as you might think. Yeah.

Harriet Ritvo 32:33

Although I think I think it is important and and maybe more important than people sometimes acknowledge for humanists who write about animals to know what the science says, even even if only to interpret it.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 32:46

How do you approach that? So if you're looking at a historical period, does it make it, you know, so you now know that there's these different ways of viewing animals? And and I mean, looking across time makes it even more complex, right? Because the scientific understanding of the same animal today is different to the scientific understanding of the animal then, the vernacular understanding of today is different to the vernacular understanding then. So, how do you bring into play, I guess, not only these different types of taxonomies, but thinking about these taxonomies across time. So, so yeah, like what would you you're going into the archive or you're approaching a historical project, how are you sensitive to these differences? Like, what is the what are the nuts and bolts of how you look at this question?

Harriet Ritvo 33:29

In a way, that's a big question and hard to generalize. But I would say one thing it to avoid if possible is not to think that because people 150, 250 years ago didn't understand things the way we do, that they were being stupid. It's I think it's important to respect, respect your sources. I mean, and even if you know that the reason that they're thinking differently is because, you know, they had bad ideas about other things, you know, it's um it's hard to be sympathetic with the politics of, for example, of many, many historical figures. Uh, certainly, you know, someone like Linnaeus, who didn't want to educate his daughters, not a sympathetic character. But, you know, that there's usually a good reason, at least in their terms, for what people thought.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 34:21

So to like contextualize their knowledge as well, how their classifications and their knowledge exist in that time. When you're when you're thinking about this, maybe you can give us an example from your work of you, I guess, coming to grips with a logic that was quite different to how it is today, and contextualizing it. Like, is there an example that can help us understand these taxonomies in play?

Native And Invasive Meanings Shift

Harriet Ritvo 34:41

Oh, well, here now here's here here's an example, I think. We think about the way we think about native species now, we kind of valorize them and we wish to preserve them and to defend them from competition with invasives. Of course, a rhetoric that when you transpose it to the human context is a little upsetting. But um, well, certainly as you referred to it in the era of European colonization of what became settler colonies, you know, North America and Australia, the southern Africa, we transplanted our domesticated uh animals and plants wholesale and with enormously transformative effect. So one kind of animal that was transplant, actually was attempted to be transplanted several times to the Caribbean and and even to the southwestern United States, but the only place it took was in Australia, and that was the camel. And the re at the moment there are more free-living camels in Australia than there are any place else in the world. Um really um and the reason is that aha, Tony. Tony wants in on the camel discussions. The reason is that, you know, until uh until there were railroads and and roads and cars and so forth, get it transporting things across the interior of Australia, which is mostly desert, was a challenge. And and camels did a better job than vehicles with wheels. And so a lot of camels were imported from South Asia and they were bred in Australia and valued as domesticated animals. You you know, the basically they were alternatives to horses. I mean, of course, camels' feet are better suited for for desert type environments than horses' hooves. Anyway, but but then when you know modern transportation networks uh emerged in the 20th century, same thing happened to the camels in Australia as happened to horses in North America and Europe. That is, all of a sudden, they were surplus to requirements. They're big expensive animals to keep. And so some people killed them, and some people just let them go. And they apparently like it in the desert, and they bred and thrived, and now there are now they are considered a massive invasive species. And you know, the there's a question about what to do, what if anything to do about it. I mean, similar discussions are to do with wild horses in in the western United States. You know, they're clearly invasive, they're big, they make an impact on the environment, but they're large, intelligent animals. You know, obviously they would prefer not to be shot, but the for they've been converted from an extremely useful domesticated animal into an invasive feral species.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 38:02

And this is, I mean, this is interesting because it speaks to what you're talking about with the tension between the vernacular and the scientific, because scientifically, you know, the camels have remained perhaps consistent or similar understanding across time here, but the social cultural understanding of them in specific places has changed dramatically. Um, so yeah, and and that has very big material implications for them. And obviously, they've persisted and they've survived, and ecologies are dynamic places, and it's it's just always curious. I think I mean Australia and New Zealand are particularly interesting places because large and many wild and domesticated animals have been labeled invasive. But at what point does an animal become no longer invasive when it's got a very long history and has also started to change ecologies for a substantial period of time?

Harriet Ritvo 38:50

Of course, and again, that's something you could talk about human human migrants as well. Um but well, one example again from Australia. The last time I was there, the Australian government had produced a series of postage stamps of native animals. It certainly didn't include camels, but I was surprised that it included the dingo, which was introduced not by Europeans, but but by people, by the people who who lived in Australia first. It definitely is not a marsupial, which which Australian mammals, except for bats, are. So apparently, at least in somebody's opinion at the post office, thousands of years, but not that many thousands, is enough to make you a native.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 39:37

Yeah, and even then being native is not necessarily enough. I had someone on to talk about compassionate conservation, uh, Daniel, and I've forgotten his name now, his surname, Dan. Dan, really nice guy, Dan. Um, he was speaking about uh kangaroos in Australia. And they are, of course, very much native and supposedly protected under the law, but you can shoot and kill them because they've been construed as pests as well, which is just so so it's not really about clearly it's not about whether you are from there or not from there, it's about the politics of how you're understood relative to everything else.

Harriet Ritvo 40:16

Well, uh to some extent, yes. And of course, Australia is an island, and so it hasn't had that much contact until except with the help of people since it it became an island. But like in in the and also a lot of a lot of that kind of preservationism kind of ignores the fact that the distribution of species changes without any interference from people. I mean, in response to changes in climate and so forth. I mean, there's a very good book called After the Ice Age, which is about the re-population of uh North America, because you know, when there was a mile of ice on top of the northern half of North America, of course, nothing was living there. And so the the current uh native plants and animals um either came back from the south or came once once uh the Bering Land Bridge was available, came over uh just like people from um from Asia. And so the idea that what you want to do is make sure the um animals and plants where you live are exactly the same as what your grandmother remembers is kind of a historical misunderstanding. And certainly with the way the climate is changing now, you have to hope that animals and plants will reorganize themselves.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 41:52

Yeah. And yeah, I mean, that's there's really important implications for uh having this kind of fixed understanding of what kind of ecology we want and we aspire to have, uh, especially because, as you said, climate change is impacting animals. And even when they seem to make decisions, we can't seem to help but intervene. I think it's in Scotland now where wild cats are breeding with domesticated cats, and they they are they are changing the dynamics of what people like about the wildcats to some extent, and people don't like it because they want to. Some people don't like it.

Harriet Ritvo 42:30

I mean, that's that's I mean, wildcats are the ancestor species of domestic cats, and even though they were domesticated not in Scotland, but around the Mediterranean. Um and all, if the if if the ancestor species is still extant, which like for cows it's not, the domestic species interbreeds with them without any problem, produces fertile offspring, and so forth. And in fact, giving domesticated animals a separate species name is a recognition or uh of human control, a kind of valuation of human control, not really a recognition of anything very biological. And in fact, um there's an analogous to the fuss about the purity of Scottish wildcats, is concern about the purity of our uh American bisons, which are one of the great conservation success

Wildness, Domestication, And Hybrid Lines

Harriet Ritvo 43:34

stories. They were down to a very few animals around the beginning of the 20th century. And now there are so many of them, I mean, domesticated as well as wild, that you can buy buffalo burgers out west if you want. Or and they and they sell beefalo, which is hybrids between bison and cattle, in grocery stores on the grounds that it's less fatty than um regular beef. So they they're different genuses, not not even different, just different species, but bison and cattle will interbreed. And there's been some of that intentionally, you know, which like producing the beefaloes. But it turns out that the wild ones, if you go like to Yellowstone Park and you know, you drive around and you see them all over the place and they look like bisons and they act like bisons. But if you do their DNA, it turns out that quite a lot of them have a bit of cow in them, a bit of Bos Taurus. And presumably some of it might be because some of the animals were somehow came from herds that had been, you know, living in domesticated circumstances. But some of it probably was uh due to the agency of the animals themselves in in the years before the range was fenced in. When, you know, be and before the buffaloes, you know, were were were so decimated, where presumably they were okay with it. Yeah.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 45:01

Um so uh so why make a fuss? Yeah, it's it's it's interesting. There's a lot of like boundary work happening where we want to protect and preserve the purity of some, but then others we want to uh not want to consistently and regularly interfere with and change and cross-breed and cross cross-pollinate and do all of these things to our heart's desire. But when other animals take on the agency to you know jump across boundaries and borders because it's maybe in their interests to do so, whatever those interests are for survival, for sex, for they just made a choice to do it, we intervene. Um, and I mean again, I know this is part of conservation strategies, but conservation, yeah. I just the amount of resources that are going into the Scottish cat thing to keep Scottish cats and regular cats separate because this will make the Scottish cats extinct, just seems to me like a strange move. I I maybe I don't know enough to square it away, but I think Oh, I I agree with you. It seems strange to me as well. Yeah, I just can't quite get it. And there's, and I know you've written a fair bit now about the, so we've spoken about vernacular, we've spoken about scientific classification, but of when we talk even now in our conversation, we're often using these big, we've got these, maybe it's part of the vernacular, but we've got these big categories of animals, right? But we think of as domesticated animals, wild animals, liminal animals, where we've clumped together a whole host of animals. Um, and I know you've written about this a fair bit. Uh how does that work? How does how do the imaginaries and the taxonomies of wild and domestic function historically? Well, that's what my current research is about.

Harriet Ritvo 46:37

In fact, um, and both camels and Scottish wildcats and bison, they all figure in it. But people talk about wild wildness and domesticated as though it was clear what they are. But all that's really clear, and this is you can even get this if you look them up in the Oxford English Dictionary, which is a wonderful historical dictionary, is that they're the opposite of each other. That's clear. But exactly what the content of that opposition is, is not so clear. And actually, the work I've been doing is about animals that one way or another are ambiguous, where they they live in uh in a gray area where they might be sort of wild or they might be sort of domesticated.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 47:20

It's that categorization, but it's also what they're doing and where they are. So a really good example here are let's say rats and dogs, for example. A rat, I mean, you could think about wild rats, liminal rats, uh, domesticated rats, sure, but you could think about them in very different contexts, doing very different things. Lab rats versus a sewer rat versus a pet rat are living very different lives and sitting very differently in people's imaginaries as well, right? So it's it's it's really, I think this is why this theme and the topic we're talking about now is so interesting because the more you look at a specific context, you have to overlay these multiple understandings onto one another to I think really get a richer, whatever historical context you're looking at, whether it's a specific town or city or a big history of something, is how do you understand these tensions? Like how do you have rats that configure so differently in people's imaginaries and without necessarily the conflict you would imagine? Does that make any sense? Yeah, yeah.

Harriet Ritvo 48:24

And but of course, and it has physical uh physical implications too. I mean, the selection pressures that operate on sewer rats and lab rats and pet rats are quite different.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 48:38

Yeah, the way they live their lives, the way their bodies are physically constituted is very different.

Harriet Ritvo 48:44

And what can what traits get selected for, either by natural selection or by artificial selection.

Natural Selection, Darwin, And Caution

Claudia Hirtenfelder 48:54

This is um forgive me for my ignorance, but I'm hoping you might know. People often seem to have the idea that humans are now outside of natural selection, that we no longer function out with natural selection. What's your view on that?

Harriet Ritvo 49:07

We're not we're not absolutely outside of it, but we've managed to compensate for um some things that would be selected out in a harsher environment. And so um people can survive and leave offspring with carrying forward traits that um in the wild would lead to um early death uh or infertility and so forth. So uh but but there are still things that do make that kind of difference. Obviously, there yeah, there are hereditary conditions that make people die, die, die young, and those those traits aren't aren't passed on. And presumably um there are some conditions that make people less likely to leave children. And that's I mean, that's you know, Darwin did not make up evolution as people often say, but what he did do was explain how it worked, that is, by selection. And he actually used, I mean, he talked about natural selection, that is um the differential survival in innate of offspring and leaving of offspring in nature, but he used um as his analogy uh breeding, artificial selection, because that was something that everybody understood.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 50:28

Really interesting. Um, I know you said your your quote is from Darwin, so maybe now's a good time to hear what he has to say.

Harriet Ritvo 50:35

Okay, yes, it's from the very end of the origin of species. Let's see. It says there is a grandeur in this view of life with its set several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one, and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved. And what made you choose that? Um I'm a fan of Darwin.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 51:22

And that's what you just you like his writing, you like his work, you like his thinking. I like his writing.

Harriet Ritvo 51:29

Um I mean he he is a very good writer, actually. Um and um obviously uh his work is uh uh amazingly important. That's an understatement. He was um not as vilified in his time as people sometimes think. That is, his wife wanted to bury him when he died in the the church in their village, but in fact he's at Westminster Abbey, and you know that suggests esteem. And uh the other thing is that you know, mostly major historical figures, authors, and so forth I mean, much as you may admire their work, you don't feel like you you feel happy that you didn't have to meet them. Um but that's not how I feel about Darwin.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 52:26

You wish you had met him? Oh, absolutely, yeah. He seemed like someone who was willing to adventure and also, I don't know, just seemed open to seeing things differently, which obviously, I mean, that's just a simple statement, but um, I think it does take a certain courage to not only see differently, but to then say what you're seeing differently. Um, and and also to say it with such beauty is uh quite something. And I do love that he said, you know, continuing and and evolving. And to what we were saying about humans, I think I think it's just another one of those things we do to detach ourselves from the animal world that somehow we're outside of evolution, it's like on hubris. Of course, we're still practicing and part of these ecological and biological processes. Um, is there anything else? So, in thinking about taxonomies and taxonomies of difference, we've I think we've I mean we've had a conversation that's gone in a few different directions, but we've spoken about different types of categorizations, we've spoken about the ways in which the same discourses can be mobilized against both humans and animals. We've spoken about some of the ways in which those discourses and technologies have been used with and against different humans and animals over time, um, and that there's these slippages between all these different categories all the time. Um, so what do you view as the, I suppose, the the role? Yeah, I mean, I think you've answered this. I was gonna say, what's the role of history in all of this? Why, why look at these differences? But I isn't that the prize? Well, I mean, but you can ask that question about history in general.

Harriet Ritvo 53:58

Um and uh and you know, if you um if you pay attention to the news, you can see that not knowing history of various kinds uh can produce problematic understandings and policies. So why do you think why do you think people should look at animals? Well, animals have always been an important component of our environment, whether they live with us or or they don't. And um understanding what they've meant and how we've interacted with them over time can maybe help us be sensible about what we do now. Although, you know, truth to tell, I mean, history is great.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 54:46

It is, it is really great. Um, do a final really twisty question, I guess, is do you think there's a way for us to know how animals have viewed us differently over time? No.

Harriet Ritvo 55:00

I have a hard time even figuring out what's on my cats' minds and uh or what's on the mind of the rabbits who who who are in my backyard. I read I read somewhere recently that um there are hopes that AI will be able to tell us what animals are thinking, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 55:21

And if we can't know what they think of humans over time, do you think there's a way we can write histories that center them as and their experiences? Or do you think that that's edging too close to anthropomorphism?

Harriet Ritvo 55:44

I think um I think that a lot of the rhetoric around animal agency and scholarship is overclaiming. It's good to respect them, but we should also respect their their distance and their diff their difference. Uh for example, what Tony just said, I mean, I think he was probably just saying, look at me, but who knows?

Claudia Hirtenfelder 56:16

You don't think you know your cat when he says things and he's saying, Oh, I'm hungry, or he's making himself known in this way what his desires might be.

Harriet Ritvo 56:25

Um I think I act as though I know what he's saying, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure that um I do know.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 56:35

Okay. So you take the more cautious route of making sure that you don't rather be cautious than overclaim or overstate what they um what they might be experiencing.

Harriet Ritvo 56:45

Well, of course, he I mean, at such times as I'm positive what the what what he wants, then I rush to accommodate because it's because it doesn't happen all the time that I think that I'm positive that I know what they want.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 56:59

It's interesting what you say, because I've I've spoken to a couple of people, and and Linus, in some ways, I feel like animals often say what they think or what they need or asking for in ways that are much clearer and plainer than many humans do, right? When Linus wants to go outside, he sits in front of the door, he's making, he's making his intention very clear. There is no, um, whereas if I ask one of my human companions, would you like to go for a walk? Oh, I don't know, do you want to go for a walk? Have you thought about going for a walk? And there's all this like self-doubt in the language games we play sometimes get in the way of what we actually want. Whereas Linus seems to have a very clear idea of what he wants and he communicates quite clearly with his body. Dogs are more interested in communicating with people than cats are.

Harriet Ritvo 57:50

They only meow at us at us.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 57:52

So it's it's interesting. I mean, maybe this is one of these taxonomies or these categorizations that we're currently in the midst of right now, right? Trying to figure out how to give um it's it's another space of ambiguity where we haven't quite fixed animals and how we feel it's appropriate to talk about what they do and how they do it.

Harriet Ritvo 58:10

And they don't, I mean, I have to say this is probably inappropriate for your um for your uh refined podcast, but um when Tony thinks I should change the kitty litter, he urinates inappropriately.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 58:25

That is perfectly toned for this podcast. I'll have you say, I've spoken about Linus pooping multiple times because he takes his pooping very seriously. There is um, yeah, there are there are practices and processes that have to be followed when it comes to his poop. So that is, I think it's it's an it's an uh of having someone else on this this season on Animals and History who did uh ethnography with cows as a way of trying to write a better history. And I thought that that was a really interesting strategy to go. Is how do you, you know, spending time with the animals. Of course, they're different cows today than they were historically. Uh, their bodies have changed, the types of relationships they're engaged in have changed. But it was a it was an interesting method for trying to think about how he could make the animals more present in his own writing, uh, which uh I'm I have to say I'm I'm attracted to. I think I'm I think I'm I'm a bit more in line with the the other camp than you know that that we could possibly access their agency. I'm not saying run away with it and just say that, you know, John the Cow is absolutely madly in love with Susie the Cow and then getting married. No, but I think, you know, I I think there's a way to appreciate and understand their experiences. Um, and that some historical documents or reading and eye, having an attentiveness to how these animals have been categorized and written about might give us something to what their interests were, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, we'll see. We'll see. I think it's an exciting time to be in the field of animals and history.

The Edges Of Wild Project

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:00:02

Um, before we say goodbye, maybe you could tell us. I know you said you're working now on this project of domestication and and wildness. Um, tell us a little bit more about what you're currently working on, if anything else. And um, if people are interested in your work, how they can get into it.

Harriet Ritvo 1:00:16

Oh, well, they can uh I mean I mean, writing a book is a big enough project. Um, you know, I do bits and pieces when people ask me, ask me to, but the tentative title of my book is The Edges of Wild. That's tentative. But if people like to email me, my, you know, just my the history department at MIT has my email address and uh yeah.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:00:39

And and when do you uh expect this next book or this next work would be complete? Oh, what a good question. The dreaded question. The question no PhD student author ever wants to be asked. Um it takes a while. How long have you been working on it for now? Let's say that. Oh, well, too long.

Harriet Ritvo 1:00:58

About I I think Tony, give just stop biting the wire. Um about well, really close to 10 years, I think. So I should, I should, I should finish it up.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:01:10

Wow, that's amazing. I don't know. Some of the best authors take time. I know Dinesh, I've heard Dinesh Widewell also say he takes about at least 10 years to write a book. And all of the best uh fantasy novels and stuff all take 10, 15 years. So if they can do it, why not academics? Um well, that's amazing. I can't wait to read it when it comes out. Uh, thank you so much for joining us on the show and for giving us some insight into taxonomies and the ways in which they work and how we can just have a life for them doing historical work. Thank you. Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.

Atlantic Salmon And Changing Ecologies

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:01:47

Welcome back to the animal highlight, everyone. In today's episode, Harriet Ritfour spoke a lot about taxonomies and the ways in which we categorize animals. So I decided to tell you a little bit about Atlantic salmon in Kingston today. Just a reminder that the content here is taken from the Stones Walking Tour, which is a walking tour I created on the Stones website, which does a whole bunch of local walking tours about Kingston. The reason I chose to focus on salmon is as you'll see in the script, there is a whole bunch of different ways in which salmon have been understood by different people and how that's changed quite a bit over time. And I think this speaks a lot to some of the social and biological changes that came up in the conversation between Harriet and I in the main interview. Anyway, I hope you enjoy listening and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Here we go. In many indigenous traditions, salmon are recognized as forming their own people or nation with a distinctive role to play in creation, and as such are frequently portrayed in indigenous art and stories. In Anishinaabe teachings, for example, fish are believed to be the holders of stars and of wisdom. Salmon were a vital food source for the Hodanoshawne people who used to fish for them in Lake Ontario between September and November. At the end of the American Revolution, when colonial settlement along the shores of the lake intensified, salmon became an important food for settlers too, who often traded with indigenous fishers in the Kingston region. I quote, the appeal of salmon to potential frontier settlers was great. It was a food that would come to them in their new homes under its own power. It could be captured relatively easily and safely. It was more reliable than the charity of their fellows, close quote. Consequently, salmon became a vital component of settler diet, eaten fresh when possible, with the remainder salted for the winter. In 1846, Kingston's fish market was located at the foot of Brock Street. Edwin Horsey, in his book Chronicling Life in Kingston at the time, said that fishing boats landed and were drawn on the shores in rows, and the fish were exposed for sale. This was before the fish house was built. At the time, Atlantic salmon would have still been sold at the market, but they were a rapidly declining part of the Lake Ontario ecosystem. In earlier centuries, reports about the ubiquity of Atlantic salmon were common. The animals spawned in the gravel beds of various streams and rivers that flowed into Lake Ontario, including several in and around Kingston. Around age three, the fish would leave the streams for the open lake, mingling with other salmon before returning upstream to spawn. Unlike their Pacific counterparts, these salmon can spawn more than once in their lives. The increasing consumption of salmon coupled with disturbances to their habitats made by pollutants from mills and factories on the shore, the removal of trees, the erection of canals, and rapid urbanization saw their numbers plummet until in 1898 it is believed that the last Lake Ontario Atlantic salmon was caught. The species had suffered what is known as a local extinction. Some of their Pacific kin were introduced to Lake Ontario in the 1860s, but unlike the Atlantic salmon, these fish only spawn once and are not indigenous to the region. In 2006, a program was launched to try and reintroduce Atlantic salmon. It is colloquially known as the Bring Back the Salmon Restoration Program and is supported by the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters. Atlantic salmon are now spawning in the Credit River near Niagara after being absent there for 150 years. It is interesting to think about the connections between hunting, conservation, and colonialism. What does it mean to introduce or even reintroduce a species that might be hunted again? How do these removals and additions change animal nations and their ecosystems?

Thanks, Sponsors, And Sign Off

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:05:42

Thank you to Harriet Ritfo for being an incredible guest. As always, thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, and Law and Ethics Apple for sponsoring this podcast. Thank you to Rebecca Shen, Christian Ments, Hera DeBont, and Carlos Solzani for their back of house support. Thank you goes to Gordon Clark for the bed music and Jeremy John for the logo. The animal highlight was taken off of the Stones website, and the link will be in the show notes. This episode was produced, hosted, and edited by myself. This is The Animal Turn.

Harriet Ritvo 1:06:16

With me, Claudia Hirtenfelder.com. That's I R O A R P O D dot com.