Animal City: The Domestication of America

by Andrew A. Robichaud

Overview

Why do America’s cities look the way they do? If we want to know the answer, we should start by looking at our relationship with animals.

Americans once lived alongside animals. They raised them, worked them, ate them, and lived off their products. This was true not just in rural areas but also in cities, which were crowded with livestock and beasts of burden. But as urban areas grew in the nineteenth century, these relationships changed. Slaughterhouses, dairies, and hog ranches receded into suburbs and hinterlands. Milk and meat increasingly came from stores, while the family cow and pig gave way to the household pet. This great shift, Andrew Robichaud reveals, transformed people’s relationships with animals and nature and radically altered ideas about what it means to be human.

As Animal City illustrates, these transformations in human and animal lives were not inevitable results of population growth but rather followed decades of social and political struggles. City officials sought to control urban animal populations and developed sweeping regulatory powers that ushered in new forms of urban life. Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals worked to enhance certain animals’ moral standing in law and culture, in turn inspiring new child welfare laws and spurring other wide-ranging reforms.

The animal city is still with us today. The urban landscapes we inhabit are products of the transformations of the nineteenth century. From urban development to environmental inequality, our cities still bear the scars of the domestication of urban America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674919365
Publisher:	Harvard
Publication date:	12/17/2019
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Andrew A. Robichaud is Assistant Professor of History at Boston University, where he teaches courses on environmental history, the history of cities, and the history of humans’ relations with animals.

Table of Contents

Introduction Gentlemen Hogs 1

1 Cow Town 13

New York City and the Urban Dairy Crisis, 1830-1860

2 "The War on Butchers" 47

San Francisco and the Remaking of Animal Space, 1850-1870

3 Blood in the Water 88

The Butchers' Reservation and the Reshaping of San Francisco

4 How to Kill a Horse 128

SPCAs, Urban Order, and State Power, 1866-1910

5 That Doggy in the Window 159

The SPCA and the Making of Pets in America

6 Captivating Spectacles 197

Public Battles over Animal Entertainment

7 Domesticating the Wild 231

Woodward's Gardens and the Making of the Modern Zoo

Conclusion 261

Stampede

Notes 269

Acknowledgments 317

Index 321

Editorial Reviews

Deeply researched and supremely analytical, with a compelling strength of narrative purpose, Animal City is a superb history. Robichaud has written the kind of book that will show even the most skeptical readers that animal history is key to grasping American history.

Louis Warren

In this outstanding history, Robichaud powerfully recreates the snarling, barking, and mooing past where milk cows, stray dogs, slaughterhouse cattle, and working horses were part of daily life. Erasing animals from our streets and homes to improve sanitation and diminish cruelty, he argues, made it easier to justify their continued exploitation. Animal City is an eloquent reminder that this older urban menagerie persists even if we cannot always recognize our fellow residents.

Matthew Klingle

Based on exhaustive research, Animal City provides a rich description of nineteenth-century human and animal lives, including the landscapes, laws, economies, and institutions that shaped them. Robichaud has made a landmark contribution to how we understand this formative period in American urban and animal history.

Peter Alagona

In ways that can seem unimaginable today, urban animals played a major role in shaping how nineteenth-century Americans debated laws, considered the boundaries of brutality, transformed economies and environments, and ultimately understood themselves. Through masterful storytelling and deep historical research, Andrew Robichaud paints this ecologically diverse urban world in vivid colors, showing readers that we cannot understand modern cities without acknowledging their controversial and often invisible animal past.

Catherine McNeur

A welcome historical exploration of the ways in which human-animal relationships have played ongoing, and oftentimes disturbing, roles in urban development…Engaging and unique.

Journal of Historical Geography - Julie Urbanik

A worthwhile addition to the historical literature of animals in the city.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History - Joel A. Tarr

A book of impressive scope…It is a superb contribution to animal history, environmental history, urban history, and nineteenth-century history. It is well written and accessible, and it would be a fine book to introduce anyone to animal history.

Journal of Arizona History - Ann Norton Greene

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