Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society

Rebecca Jane Houghton Woods

This dissertation explores the relationship between types of livestock and place in the context of Great Britain's expanding agro-pastoral empire. Specifically, it examines how the distribution and circulation of breeds of livestock native to the British Isles influenced understandings of kind and location-of the dynamic interaction between heredity, human influence and environmental conditions, and their various fluid effects on ovine and bovine diversity. Drawing on extensive archival work in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia, I trace both the national origins and imperial expansion of British breeds. As Britain industrialized in the early nineteenth century, breeders faced the need to convert the specificity of their animals into fungibility while maintaining the distinctive character of their breeds, seemingly incompatible aims that nonetheless guaranteed the economic viability of their stock. Thus they reoriented local variability towards market standardization, transforming regional types of cattle and sheep into geographically transposable, bulky, and quick-fattening beasts suited for increasingly sophisticated economies and industrialized production. Tension between standardization and specialization shaped the dispersal of breeds throughout the empire as well. Here, stockbreeders served two masters: the unfamiliar climates and topographies of Australia, New Zealand, and North America, which demanded local adaptations, and the British consumer, whose dinner table was the end of the line for the bulk of colonial beef and mutton. As they tried to balance local adaptation and metropolitan taste, breeders experimented with heredity, testing the limits of contemporary understandings of heritability and breed plasticity, and developed of new strains of livestock genetically derived from British breeds, but culturally, economically and environmentally hybrid. In the process, imperialism itself was instantiated in these animals. Bodies of sheep and cattle were remade to suit new lands and later to fill the refrigerated holds of ocean liners. The empire itself was recast as a vast apparatus for feeding Britons. This system, divested of its imperial trappings and disseminated still further, brings meat to tables around the world today.

Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900

The Herds Shot Round the World

Laurel Braitman

Beginning in the late 19 th century, changing conceptions of relatedness between people and other animals -- and animals' assumed capacities for, or susceptibilities to, mental or emotional distress-- were influenced by debates over what it meant to be both human and sane in Britain and the United States. Through a historical, partly-ethnographic, investigation of animal insanity in various times and places in the Anglo-American world from the late I 9 th century through the early 21st, I argue that identifying animal madness, insanity, nervous disorders, anxiety disorders, phobias, depression, obsessive compulsivities, suicidal behaviors and more, has not only served as a way of affixing meaning to puzzling animal acts, but has been used to denote borders (or lack thereof) between certain groups of humans and certain groups of animals. As with other divisions, such as those hinging on race, gender, nationality or class, ideas surrounding which humans and which other animals could experience particular forms of insanity have been used to justify certain forms of treatment (or mistreatment), to rationalize needs for confinement or freedom, or to determine what sorts of people and other creatures were deserving of rights and to what degree. I suggest that the history of attempts to identify certain emotional phenomena such as melancholy and suicidal behavior in horses and monkeys, to, more recently, obsessive-compulsivity in parrots and PTSD in military dogs, demonstrates that other animals have acted as mirrors and proxies for disordered Anglo-American minds for more than a century. Drawing upon archival sources, published literature in the fields of ethology, psychology, psychiatry, psychopharmacology, and the veterinary sciences, as well as environmental history, history of medicine and animal studies, combined with interviews and participant observation, I argue that attempts to locate insanity, mental illness, dysfunction and "normalcy" among nonhumans has had wide-ranging effects on diagnostic and therapeutic practices in humans and other animals alike in the United States and Britain.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society

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