Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
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Historian Michael Glover talks about what it takes to write animal history that treats cows as sentient subjects while still meeting the standards of rigorous scholarship. He unpacks how fieldwork with cows in the Karoo affected his writing.
Topics Covered:
Michael’s path into animal history through South African landscapes
The methodological gap in writing historical animals as subjects
Historical ethnography as a way of rebuilding past worlds from documents and artefacts
Spending 30 days with free-roaming Nguni cattle as an “amateur observer”
Using field experience to write more feelingly without forcing direct anachronistic comparisons
Why “cattle” is a compromised word and how language can erase individuality
Accountability in writing, values in scholarship, and avoiding ad hominem dismissal
Animal highlight on beavers, the fur trade, and shifting colonial valuations
"At moments when stuck or struggling over a passage or concept, I would stop and ask: 'What would you say if an elephant were standing right in front of you listening? What would you say that is honest and would not make you feel ashamed?'" – G.A Bradshaw, Elephants on the Edge
Credits:
Sponsor: Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E)
Guests: Michael Glover
Host: Claudia Hirtenfelder
Editing and Production: Claudia Hirtenfelder
Episode Artwork: Rebecca Shen
Content Creation and Support: Herre de Bondt and Carlo Salzani
Animal Highlight: Stones Walking Tour
Sound Effects: Epidemic Sound, BBC Sound Effects
Bed Music: Gordon Clarke
Logo: Jeremy John
Save the World Podcast In-depth lectures and interviews on issues affecting the continued survival of human...
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.
S9E6: Municipal Records with Frederick L. Brown
Season 9 · Episode 6
Monday, October 12, 2026 • Duration 49:04
In this episode we continue our focus on methodology by talking with Frederick L. Brown about how he used municipal archives to conduct his more-than-human history of Seattle. We discuss everything from petitions to bylaws, pound records, council minutes, public health reports, property tax assessments, and city directories.
Topics Covered:
why urban animal history matters and why cities are always more than human
how Seattle’s city archives make animal searching possible through indexing
a quick taxonomy of archives including government, historical societies, companies, and personal collections
why archives are not neutral and how bias enters through preservation practices
salmon, treaty rights, racial covenants as tools of spatial power
Sanborn insurance maps, council minutes, and the money logic behind record keeping
Frederick’s next book on importing European songbirds and the challenge of scattered sources
Animal highlight: Kingston dogs, shifting freedom, and changing control over time
Date Recorded: 2 April 2026
Frederick L. Brown is an independent scholar, book indexer, and retired National Park Service historian. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington. He is the author of the award-winning book, The City is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle (University of Washington Press, 2016). He is currently finishing up the manuscript for his second book, Birds of Home:How House Sparrows, Starlings, and Other European Songbirds Became American (University of Washington Press, 2027). He divides his time between Seattle, Washington, and Corvallis, Oregon.
In-depth lectures and interviews on issues affecting the continued survival of human...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.
S9E5: Historical Methods with Jennifer Bonnell and Sean Kheraj
Season 9 · Episode 5
Monday, October 5, 2026 • Duration 01:22:08
In this episode we switch gears toward considering historical methods. Sean Kheraj and Jennifer Bonnell come onto the show to discuss their edited book Traces of The Animal Past and together with Claudia they delve into some of the ways environmental and animal histories differ as well as some of the key methods scholars interested in them can use.
Topics Covered:
animal history versus environmental history
searching for animals in the archive
borrowing tools from natural and social sciences to widen primary sources
writing as a method
domesticated versus wild animal histories
Indigenous perspectives that reframe animals as relations and obligations
Animal Highlight: Goats in Kingston, Ontario
Date Recorded: 20 March 2026
Jennifer Bonnell is the author or co-editor of four books, including Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley, released in second edition by the University of Toronto Press in 2024, and Stewards of Splendour: A History of Wildlife and People in British Columbia, published by the Royal BC Museum in 2023. Her current book project explores efforts by nineteenth and early twentieth-century beekeepers to protect pollinator habitats in the Great Lakes Region. Jennifer teaches Canadian and environmental history at York University.
Sean Kheraj is a professor of Canadian and environmental history at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research examines a range of topics in environmental history including the role of non-human animals in nineteenth-century urban environments and the development of long distance oil pipelines in twentieth-century Canada.
In-depth lectures and interviews on issues affecting the continued survival of human...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.
S9E4: Segregation with Jules Skotnes-Brown
Season 9 · Episode 4
Monday, September 28, 2026 • Duration 01:12:05
Jules Skotnes-Brown joins Claudia on the show to discuss how segregating logics were used to govern humans and animals in South Africa’s history. This includes everything from Addo’s elephants being driven, enclosed, and “tamed”, to Kalahari San people being policed inside a national park and managed through rations and confinement.
Topics Covered:
The difference between environmental history and animal history
Defining segregation as a ideological and material connections rather than direct comparisons
Addo elephants labelled vermin then reclassified as a rare “race” worth preserving
Kalahari San people policed through park rules, hunting bans, arrests, and rationing
The spectrum from pest to protected as a tool of governance and population control
Plague, sanitation, and health departments as engines for forced removal and spatial separation
How metaphors of infestation travel from animals to humans and back again
Animal highlight: pigs in Kingston, waste policy, hog cholera, and urban bylaw change
Date Recorded: 16 October 2025
Jules Skotnes-Brown is a historian of animals, disease, and knowledge production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910-1948, which won the Royal Historical Society’s First Book Prize in 2025. He is currently writing a second book on the global history of rats, plague, and capitalist infrastructure in the twentieth century. Jules completed his PhD at University of Cambridge History and Philosophy Science in 2020. Jules is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at University of Liverpool and PI of the Wellcome Trust funded research project 'Conserving Global Health: Biodiversity Protection and the Prehistory of Planetary Health' (2026-2031). The project will explore the historical engagements, collaborations and frictions between conservation theories and practices and international, global, and planetary health in the long twentieth century. In so doing, it will provide a prehistory of Planetary Health.
In-depth lectures and interviews on issues affecting the continued survival of human...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.
S9E3: Taxonomies with Harriet Ritvo
Season 9 · Episode 3
Monday, September 21, 2026 • Duration 01:07:26
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:
In-depth lectures and interviews on issues affecting the continued survival of human...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.
S9E2: Modernity with Erica Hill and Susan Nance
Season 9 · Episode 2
Monday, September 14, 2026 • Duration 01:33:09
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:
In-depth lectures and interviews on issues affecting the continued survival of human...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.
S9E1: Animals' Cultural Histories with Sandra Swart
Season 9 · Episode 1
Monday, September 7, 2026 • Duration 01:38:21
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
In-depth lectures and interviews on issues affecting the continued survival of human...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.
From the Archive: Extraterritorial Jurisdiction with Charlotte Blattner
Monday, August 24, 2026 • Duration 01:10:48
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.
Save the World PodcastIn-depth lectures and interviews on issues affecting the continued survival of human...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.
From the Archive: Shoalmates with Jonathan Balcombe
Monday, August 10, 2026 • Duration 01:08:24
[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.
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 () for the logo.
In-depth lectures and interviews on issues affecting the continued survival of human...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.
Bonus: (Anti)Vivisection with Lauren Stein and Richard Miller
Monday, August 3, 2026 • Duration 01:28:06
Vivisection is an old word for a practice that still shapes modern medicine: using living bodies as tools for knowledge. Claudia talks with Lauren Stein and Richard Miller from the National Anti-Vivisection Society to unpack some of vivisection’s history, how scientists understand it and think through the ethics of it, as well as the emergence of alternatives to its use.
Date Recorded: 22 June 2026
Lauren Stein, Ph.D., is the Director of Science and Research Programs at the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS). She joined NAVS in 2024 after spending more than a decade in academic biomedical research focused on the interactions between the brain and body and their effects on human health. Lauren holds a Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Physiology and is dedicated to advancing humane, human-relevant research technologies that replace animal use while improving scientific outcomes. Through her work at NAVS, she helps educate the public about emerging alternatives to animal testing and the future of biomedical research. Learn more at https://navs.org.
Richard Miller, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Pharmacology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a science adviser to the National Anti-Vivisection Society. After decades conducting biomedical research, he became a leading voice for replacing animal experimentation with modern, human-relevant research methods. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Animal Experimentation: Empathy, Science, and the Future of Research, which examines the history, ethics, and scientific limitations of animal-based research while exploring emerging alternatives. Dr. Miller has published more than 500 scientific papers and brings both firsthand laboratory experience and historical perspective to discussions about the future of science. Learn more at https://richardjmillerscientist.com.
In-depth lectures and interviews on issues affecting the continued survival of human...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.
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“But what can a text like this tell us about this cat? How did it feel about playing such a role in the emergence of the alliance between the French and the Wendat in the early years of the French empire in North America? What was its experience of the environments of New France? How did it adapt to the new setting? Where did it sleep?” – Sean Kheraj and Jennifer Bonnell, Traces of The Animal Past
“All honest convictions deserve respect, except the presumptuous assertion that there is nothing higher in the world than the mind of man.” – Karl von Frisch
“He knows his bees do not speak as humans. He knows their language is less but also more than his own, and he knows his new discipline allows space only for the less. Where within the rationality of his science can he find a language to communicate a difference for which no words exist? Where can he find a language in which to understand the absence of language as something other than a lack?” – Hugh Raffles
Credits:
Sponsor: Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E)
Guests: Jennifer Bonnell and Sean Kheraj
Host: Claudia Hirtenfelder
Editing and Production: Claudia Hirtenfelder
Episode Artwork: Rebecca Shen
Content Creation and Support: Herre de Bondt and Carlo Salzani
Animal Highlight: “Eat Like a Pig”: Separating pigs from humans
Quote: “The elephant problem, a term which I use as one uses the unsatisfactory phrase ‘the native problem,’ because it means to me much the same thing – the rectification of our past mistakes and the attempt to bring an old, indigenous and very different form of life into harmony with our own life and aims” from Frank Melland, Elephants in Africa (1938), p 145.
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.
“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).
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.
