Animal City

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.

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., 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., 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., 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., Animal City contends that animals are central to understanding modern cities, and modern life itself. [Robichaud’s] study demonstrates how nineteenth-century transformations in the spatial, environmental, and ethical management of animal relationships can help explain how we relate with animals today…The thematic organization and rich archival work make it very useful, while the many images and narrative vignettes make it compelling. Robichaud’s writing style is engrossing, and his stories are even reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s in their tragedy and horror…Robichaud’s work offers a rich contribution to the literature of food, as well as to that of environment, urban studies, ethics, and governance.

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.