The Animal Turn

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
Date Recorded: 13 April 2026
Michael Glover is a postdoctoral fellow at the International Studies Group, University of the Free State. He is an associate fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and a member of the Australisian Animal Studies Association. He has co-edited an anthology, Animals as Experiencing Entities: Theories and Historical Narratives (2024), and published a monograph, Cattle's Experiences of Colonialism: An Animal History of Southern Africa (2026).
Featured: 
Animals as Experiencing Entities: Theories and Historical Narratives by Michael Glover
Cattle's Experiences of Colonialism: An Animal History of Southern Africa by Michael Glover
What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? by Vinciane Despret
Animal Oppression and Human Violence by David Nibert
Elephants on the Edge by G.A Bradshaw
News with Shatabdi Chakrabarti, Jessica Scott-Reid, and Jan Dutkiewicz on The Animal Turn
Bovine Scholarship Network
Valued Beavers on Stones 
Signal Group
Quote: 
"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...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

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.

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.
Featured: 
The City is More Than Human by Frederick L. Brown
Birds of Homeby Frederick L. Brown 
The afterlives of the lively commodityby Kathryn Gillespie 
Taming Manhattanby Catherine McNeur
The Salmon People Podcast with Sandra Bartlett on The Animal Turn
Biodiversity Heritage Library
Newspapers.com
Dogs on the Move on Stones
Animal Highlight: “Dogs on the Move”
Credits:
Sponsor: Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E)
Guests: Frederick L. Brown
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
Bed Music: Gordon Clarke
Logo: Jeremy John
Save the World Podcast
In-depth lectures and interviews on issues affecting the continued survival of human...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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.

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.
Featured: 
Traces of the Animal Past: Methodological Challenges in Animal History edited by Jennifer Bonnell and Sean Kheraj
Inventing Stanley Park by Sean Kheraj
Reclaiming the Don by Jennifer Bonnell
Kicking over the Traces? Freeing the Animal from the Archive by Sandra Swart 
Occupational Hazards: Honeybee Labour as an Interpretive Device in Animal History by Jennifer Bonnell
Hearing History through Hoofbeats: Exploring Equine Volition and Voice in the Archive by Lindsay Stallones Marshall
Who is a Greyhound? Reflections on the Non-Human Digital Archive by Susan Nance 
 Accessing Animal Health Knowledge: Popular Educators and Veterinary Science in Rural Ontario by Jody Hodigns
Tuffy's Cold War: Science, Memory, and the US Nay's Dolphin by Jason Colby
The Elephant in the Archive by Nigel Rothfels
Making Tracks: A Grizzly and Entangled History by Colleen Campbell by Tina Loo
Spatial Analysis and Digital Urban Animal History by Sean Kheraj
Epilogue: Combinations and Conjunction by Harriet Ritvo
Auroraby Kim Stanley Robinson
Germs, Seeds, and Animals by Alfred Crosby
Entertaining Elephants by Susan Nance 
Animal Biographies by Eric Baratay
Cattle's Experiences of Colonialism by Michael Glover
A left-handed blow: Writing the History of Animals by Erica Fudge 
The History of Animals in the Present Moment by Erica Fudge 
Venus in Two Acts by Saidiya Hartman 
Baleen whale cortisol levels reveal a physiological response to 20th century whaling by Stephen J. Trumble
A Biologist Remembers by Karl von Frisch
Insectopedia by Hugh Raffles
Signal Group
Animal Highlight: Regimental goats  
Quotes:
“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: Stones Walking Tour
Sound Effects: Epidemic Sound, You Tube 
Bed Music: Gordon Clarke
Logo: Jeremy John
Save the World Podcast
In-depth lectures and interviews on issues affecting the continued survival of human...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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.

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.
Featured: 
Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910–1948 by Jules Skotnes-Brown
The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political Historyby Jane Carruthers
What Was It Like to Be a Cow? History and Animal Studies by Erica Fudge 
The History of Animals in the Present Moment by Erica Fudge
Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question by Bénédicte Boisseron
Venus in Two Acts by Saidiya Hartman
Vermin Beings: On Pestiferous Animals and Human Game by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe
The Sanitation Syndrome by Maynard Swanson 
Elephants in Africa by Frank Melland
The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis
Scurrying seafarers: shipboard rats, plague, and the land/sea borderby Jules Skotnes-Brown
Sulphuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Fumigationby Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynetris
Stones: Animal Histories of Kingston by Claudia Hirtenfelder
Pigs Peace Sanctuary
The Animal Turn Signal Group
Other episodes of The Animal Turn
S5E4: Epidemiological Dividual with Christos Lynteris 
Season 8: Animals and Media
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.
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: Jules Skotnes-Brown
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
Bed Music: Gordon Clarke
Logo: Jeremy John
Save the World Podcast
In-depth lectures and interviews on issues affecting the continued survival of human...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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.

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/ 
Save the World Podcast
In-depth lectures and interviews on issues affecting the continued survival of human...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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.