The Animal Turn

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.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the  iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.

Erica Hill and Susan Nance join Claudia on the show to discuss “modernity.” They discuss what this relatively messy shorthand means for history and for understanding human–animal relations. They try to unpack what is meant by modernity and touch on everything from industrialisation to concealment and consumption.  
Topics Covered:
 Animal History, the journal that tries to understand animals as historical subjects
 Using animal welfare science to interpret historical animals’ behaviour
Zooarchaeology, domestication, and deep-time shifts that complicate ideas of modernity
 Concealment and the contradictions of animal use
 Intensification and standardisation
 Celebrity animals and hidden populations 
 Animal Highlight: Bears in Kingston, Ontario
Date Recorded: 27 April 2026
Erica Hill is President's Arctic Professor at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, Alaska. She is an archaeologist with broad research interests in how humans and animals lived together in the past. She has published extensively on Indigenous human engagement with marine mammals in the North Pacific and has worked in Iceland, Peru, and the US Southwest. Her most recent edited volume is Reimagining Human–Animal Relations in the Circumpolar North (2024) with Peter Whitridge. 
Susan Nance is Professor of History and affiliated faculty with the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. She is the author of various books and articles, including Rodeo: An Animal History (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and Animals in Nineteenth Century America: A History in Documents (Broadview Press, 2026). Susan is also Co-Lead Editor at Animal History, the first scholarly journal dedicated to the histories of animal life and human-animal relationships. Her current research documents the nature and scope of the trade in biologically-wild animals in the 20th century United States through a study of Las Vegas. https://susannance.com/ 
Featured: 
Animal History
Rodeo: An Animal History by Susan Nance
The Historical Animal by Susan Nance
Reimagining Human-Animal Relations in the Circumpolar North edited by Peter Whitridge and Erica Hill
Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development by Jennifer Robinson 
What Is Animal Prehistory? by Shumon T. Hussain
Man and the Natural World by Kieth Thomas
Hundreds trying to storm Wisconsin beagle research facility on the CNN
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: Susan Nance and Erica Hill
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: BBC Sound Effects; Epidemic Sound
Bed Music: Gordon Clarke
Logo: Jeremy John
A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the  iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.

Claudia speaks with historian Sandra Swart about the importance of recognising animals’ cultural histories. They discuss the maturation of animal history as a field and focus on the cultural histories of baboons and elephants in South Africa. 
Topics covered: 
Working definition of animal culture 
Fuffification and disnification of wildlife 
The deep and urban history of baboons 
A lone elephant in the Knysna Forest 
‘Rogue’ elephants in the Pilanesberg
Animal Highlight: Elephant history in Kingston, Ontario
Sandra Swart is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She is Director of the African Anthropocenes Research Centre, Guest Professor of Anthropocene History at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and co-Vice President of European Society for Environmental History. She received her DPhil in Modern History from in 2001, and simultaneously an MSc in Environmental Change and Management, both at Oxford University. She studies the more-than-human history of southern Africa. She is an editor of the Brill book series African and Asian Anthropocene: Studies in the Environmental Humanities. She is the co-author with Greg Bankoff, of , Breeds of Empire: The ‘invention’ of the horse in the Philippines and Southern Africa, 1500-1950 (Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press 2007); co-editor, with Lance van Sittert, of Canis Africanis: a dog history of southern Africa (Brill, 2008), co-editor of Gender and Animals in History (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), and co-editor with Emily O’Gorman, Mark Carey and William San Martín, The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History (Routledge, 2023). She is sole author of Riding High – Horses, Humans and History in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2010) Her most recent book is The Lion’s Historian – Africa’s Animal Past (Ohio University Press, 2025), winner of the Southern African Historical Prize 2025. Learn more. 
Date Recorded: 20 May 2026
Featured: 
The Lion’s Historian by Sandra Swart 
Riding High: Horses, Humans, and History in South Africa by Sandra Swart 
The Dreaded Comparison by Majorie Spiegel 
Cooperative Hunting: How Eels and Grouper Partner on Prey
Animal rights/human rights: Entanglements of oppression and liberation by David Nibert
Lions of Gir
Stones Walking Tour: Colonial Elephant
Other Episodes of The Animal Turn Mentioned:
S2E3: Animal Culture with Carl Safina 
S6E8: Re-Animalization with Krithika Srinivasan
Quotes: 
“Until the lion has the opportunity to tell the story of the hunt it will aways be a story of the hunter” (West African Proverb).
“I would be proud to call myself ‘the lion’s historian.’ I hope I have many years ahead exploring social and environmental history in a way that takes the other animals seriously. But let us not concede that we historians are more like baboons than lions. Of course, I mean this in the nicest possible way. A good historian is baboonesque – a trickster figure, adept at shapeshifting and boundary-crossing, unconstrained and omnivorous in our intellectual pleasures. We diligently and delicately pick the lice from the archival armpit. We are not afraid to grasp the nettle or to pluck the prickly pear of public polemic. We are strangers on the rocks, the watchers on the krantzes, the sentinels on the wall. We see and remember” (Swart, The Lion’s Historian, 2023, 294).
“We need to write histories taking a broader view beyond that of the hunter. We need accounts that connect deep history to the present moment. We need stories in which gender and generational context are not forgotten. These new histories will allow us to understand our own past as more complete in a multi-species and more-than-human context. But I would go much further and suggest that the other animals have their own histories too, both entangled in and independent of our human histories. Our understanding that animals have their own ‘cultures’, their ‘having history’ becomes irrefutable. What, after all, is history if not cultures changing over time?” (Swart, The Lion’s Historian, 2023, 83).
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
 Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo. Thank you Rebecca Shen, Christiaan Menz, Herre de Bondt, and Carlo Salzani for back of house and content support. This episode was edited and produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder. 
A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the  iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.

Charlotte Blattner discusses how international law, specifically Extraterritorial Jurisdiction, might provide a useful and productive way in which to build legal protections for animals. 

Date recorded: 10 April 2020

Guest: Charlotte E. Blattner is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Public Law, University of Bern. She earned her PhD in international law and animal law from the University of Basel, Switzerland, as part of the doctoral program Law and Animals. From 2017-2018, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Canada, working on animal labour as part of Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics (APPLE). From 2018-2020, Blattner was a  postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Program, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, to explore critical intersections of animal and environmental law. She is the author of Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders (2019, available open access here) and Animal Labour: A New Frontier of Interspecies Justice? (2020, coedited with Will Kymlicka and Kendra Coulter), both published by Oxford University Press. Blattner has argued several cases in court, including the “Primate Rights Case” currently pending at the Swiss Federal Supreme Court. Find out more about Charlotte here. 
Featured:  
Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders: Extraterritorial Jurisdiction and the Challenges of Globalization by Charlotte E. Blattner
Critical Terms for Animal Studies edited by Lori Gruen featuring Kristen Stilt
A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the  iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.

[From the Archive - Enjoy!]
Claudia talks to Jonathan Balcombe about fishes and their varied and incredible experiences. Using the concept of ‘shoalmates’ as a launch pad, they discuss some of the intra- and inter-species relations fishes engage in from work to cuddle and play. 
 
Date recorded: 30 November 2020
 
Jonathan Balcombe is a biologist with a PhD in ethology, the study of animal behavior. His books include Pleasurable Kingdom, Second Nature, The Exultant Ark, and What a Fish Knows—a New York Times best-seller now available in fifteen languages. His next book for grown-ups, Super Fly, will be published May 2021 by Penguin Books. A children’s story book about a boy and a fish is also scheduled for publication in 2021. He has taught courses in animal behavior and sentience for the Viridis Graduate Institute, and Humane Society University. He lives in Belleville, Ontario where in his spare time he enjoys biking, baking, birding, Bach, and trying to understand the neighborhood squirrels. Learn more about Jonathan and his work here. 
  
Featured:  
A foray into the worlds of animals and humans by Jakob von Uexküll; 
Sterling murmuration by canoeists; 
The Ocean Sunfishes by Tierney Thys et al; 
The Dark Hobby by Paradise Filmworks
 
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast, Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, and Jeremy John (Website) for the logo. 
A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the  iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.