Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 1 (2022), p. 156

The apparent absence of animals from twenty-first-century urban environments is a convenient illusion which, in some ways, allows urban dwellers to avoid the realities of animal suffering which sits at the core of industrial capitalism and consumer cultures. In fact, cities are ecologically diverse places, pulsing with many forms of life which entwine with and shape what we tend to think of as wholly human spheres of influence and affect. As Andrew Robichaud shows in his deeply researched and thoroughly persuasive book, though, the texture of urban multispecies engagements has its own history that needs to be uncovered, not only to allow historians to trace the roots of human-animal engagements in their present form but also to inform deeper understanding of much broader historical phenomena.

A critical intervention in the fields of urban, environmental and animal histories, Animal City provides a compelling analysis of the ways in which domesticated animals vanished from American cities by the turn of the twentieth century, while other forms of life – from horses put to work to provide essential transport to wild things displayed in ‘civilizing’ captive spaces – found new places to be seen, driven by emerging forms of consumption. In a sense, Robichaud’s style of analysis and storytelling conjures a dynamic multi-species mosaic, whose configurations fluxed over the course of the nineteenth century in response to a wide range of social, economic and political influences. In doing so, the book sits alongside works such as Joshua Specht’s Red Meat Republic (Princeton University Press, 2019) and, indeed, it also brings to mind Hilda Kean’s classic treatment of the British humane movement, Animal rights (Reaktion, 1998), which similarly addresses the vexed connections between visibility, sentiment and politics.

Robichaud’s illustration of the changing animal city is split into three key parts, tracing animal presences in several American cities, but with a focus on New York and San Francisco. The first three chapters focus on the apparent banishment of livestock from the urban environment, beginning with an examination of the forces underpinning the development of dairies in New York in the 1820s and 30s. This is followed by an analysis of spatial regulation in San Francisco, where transforming attitudes to the presence of livestock generated shifts in the organization of the city itself, leading to the creation of an ‘instant animal city’, the social, political and economic ramifications of which were far reaching. The second part (chapters 4 and 5) focus on the humane movement, illustrating the development of humane societies, their motivations and actions across the middle decades of the nineteenth century, while simultaneously pointing to the ways in which the human-animal relationships at the core of this work interacted with – and came into tension with – the processes identified in earlier chapters where animal suffering was rendered increasingly invisible. The focus of the final part (chapters 6 and 7) moves from the humane movement to forms of consumption rooted in curiosity and amusement, tracing the disappearance of ‘uncivilized’ forms of animal entertainment to the emergence of more ‘enlightened’ entertainments in the form of zoological gardens towards the later decades of the nineteenth century. The section begins with an especially compelling/disturbing vignette concerning an 1827 event at Niagara Falls, in which vast crowds gathered to watch a boatload of animals tumble to their deaths into the watery chasm (pp. 197–8). This is convincingly contrasted with the later emergence of zoos (focusing on Robert Woodward’s zoo in San Francisco) as places associated with a mode of looking at wild animals that was supposedly far removed from earlier forms of brutalizing vicarious consumption.

Across a series of city-focused case studies, the book ably evokes a compellingly visceral sense of the realities of nineteenth-century cities, conjuring an understanding of times and places characterized by the incessant multi-sensory interactions between people and animal others in American cities. Indeed, the book is especially impressive in its ability to recognize and historicize an astonishing multitude of species. At one point, Robichaud argues that the story of human-animal engagement in the modern city matters because ‘their ghosts still haunt the places in which we live’ (p. 12). Throughout the book, the author masterfully directs the reader’s gaze towards teeming urban animal shades, bringing them to life in ways which remind us that these were vibrant living beings whose suffering was very real (see the description of cows’ physical reactions to being fed distillery mash, for example, p. 22), whether or not they were visible to people bustling through the streets of nineteenth-century American cities.

Despite deep research and expansive analysis, there are some areas where questions are evoked rather than fully answered. For instance, while the book alludes to the shifting rhythms of the city itself, pointing in limited cases to elements of the nocturnal city, for example, the seasonal dynamism of urban environments remains unexplored. Like all environments, cities warp in response to the wider conditions in which they are entangled. Illuminating this instability is, of course, a mammoth task, and not within the remit of the book’s analytical and conceptual lens. Nonetheless, thinking along these lines may be a way for future scholars to build on Robichaud’s work. Striking, too, were questions about other American cities, particularly those with situated in specific environmental milieus. Were urban developments similar in the deep south to those in the cities that formed the focus of this work? Robichaud’s work provides an important inspiration to scholarship that might attack the question of local urban multispecies specificity.

In sum, Robichaud’s Animal City is significant in its contribution to scholarly understanding of the nature of cities and the diverse and transforming character of historical human animal relations. This book is comprehensive in its analysis, but also focused enough to leave room for provocation which, I suspect, will generate a burgeoning of historical analyses of city-focused human-animal relations beyond the cities which are the core focus of this work. Moreover, the ways in which social, economic, political, cultural and legal forces provide the contexts of human-animal entanglements renders this work ideal for the teaching of undergraduate courses across the fields of animal, American, environmental and urban histories. Beautifully written, the work is an accessible and wholly convincing introduction to the value of studying human-animal relationships in the pursuit of a wider understanding of place and the forces that generate historical change.