The Animal Turn

John M. Kinder is on the show to discuss World War II and zoos. Together with Claudia the episode touches on how zoos were implicated in the propaganda and the nazification of Europe, how concentration camps had zoos, and some of the devastating day to day decisions that needed to be made about the keeping of captive animals during war time. 

Topics Covered:

•  John’s pathway from war and society scholarship 
•  Zoos as politically fraught spaces 
• The problem of using the Ark as a metaphor to describe zoos. 
• The nazification of zoos and the implication of zoos in rewilding fantasies and racial hierarchies
• Zoos in concentration camps 
•  Wartime zoo logistics
• Using zoo animals to convey messages of fear and patriotism 
•  Animal highlight: horses in Kingston, Ontario

 John M. Kinder is Professor of History and Director of the American Studies Program at Oklahoma State University. He holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, and his research explores the relationship between war and American society since the nineteenth century. He has published three books: Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (2015), Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History (2022), and World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Modern Age (2025). His latest book, co-edited with historian Jennifer Murray, is titled They Are Dead and Yet They Live: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in February 2026. He is currently working on three book projects: a cultural history of alligators for the British publisher Reaktion, a true crime history of World War II-era Mississippi, and a co-edited volume about the animal trade and American empire.

Featured: 

• World War Zoos by John M. Kinder
• Paying with Their Bodies by John M. Kinder
• They Are Dead and Yet They Live edited by Edited by John M. Kinder and Jennifer M. Murray
• Service Denied Edited by John M. Kinder and Jason Hggens
• Babylon’s Ark by Lawrence Anthony
• News with Shatabdi Chakrabarti, Jessica Scott-Reid, and Jan Dutkiewicz on The Animal Turn
• Horse Poweron Stones 
• Signal Group

Credits:

• Date Recorded: 18 December 2025
• Sponsor: Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E)
• Guests: John M. Kinder 
• 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...

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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. 

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. 

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: 

• Animal History
• Rodeo: An Animal History by Susan Nance
• The Historical Animal by Susan Nance
• Reimagining Human-Animal Relations in the Circumpolar North edited by Peter Whitridge and Erica Hill
• Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development by Jennifer Robinson 
• What Is Animal Prehistory? by Shumon T. Hussain
• Man and the Natural World by Kieth Thomas
• Hundreds trying to storm Wisconsin beagle research facility on the CNN

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: Susan Nance and Erica Hill
• 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: BBC 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. 

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

Featured: 

• The Lion’s Historian by Sandra Swart 
• Riding High: Horses, Humans, and History in South Africa by Sandra Swart 
• The Dreaded Comparison by Majorie Spiegel 
• Cooperative Hunting: How Eels and Grouper Partner on Prey
• Animal rights/human rights: Entanglements of oppression and liberation by David Nibert
• Lions of Gir
• Stones Walking Tour: Colonial Elephant

Other Episodes of The Animal Turn Mentioned:

• S2E3: Animal Culture with Carl Safina 
• S6E8: Re-Animalization with Krithika Srinivasan

Quotes: 

“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).

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

 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. 

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. 

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. 

Featured:  

• Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders: Extraterritorial Jurisdiction and the Challenges of Globalization by Charlotte E. Blattner
• Critical Terms for Animal Studies edited by Lori Gruen featuring Kristen Stilt

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. 

[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. 

  

Featured:  

• A foray into the worlds of animals and humans by Jakob von Uexküll; 
• Sterling murmuration by canoeists; 
• The Ocean Sunfishes by Tierney Thys et al; 
• The Dark Hobby by Paradise Filmworks

 

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 (Website) for the logo. 

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.