AHG Seminar - Films as Archives of Working Animals

The Animal History Group was founded in 2016 by the conveners, who were working on an eclectic range of topics within animal history.  The history of animals is a broad-ranging field, which draws unexpected connections between different subjects and facilitates new understandings. Yet this very diversity can mean that researchers in different areas are unaware of each others’ work. We intend for the Animal History Group to continue to provide a forum for animal historians to meet and exchange knowledge, thus reaching new insights and making new links within the discipline.Convenors:Dr Elle Larsson completed her PhD, ‘Collecting, Curating and Construction of Zoological Knowledge: Walter Rothschild’s Zoological Enterprise, c.1878-1937’, at King’s College London in April 2020. Continuing with her research, Elle has since been working on several articles, thinking about future projects and devoting her time to her role on the Council for the Society for the History of Natural History. Elle is one of the co-founders of the Animal History Group.Dr Felicity McWilliams completed her PhD at King’s College London in 2020, with a thesis entitled ‘Equine Machines: Horses and Tractors on British Farms c.1920-1970’. A museums professional prior to her doctoral project, Felicity was the curator of two new permanent galleries at the the Museum of English Rural Life in 2016. She is currently the Research Assistant for Science & Industry at Birmingham Museums Trust. Felicity is one of the co-founders of the Animal History Group.Alison Skipper is a veterinary surgeon with a particular interest in the medical history of the pedigree dog. She is a Wellcome Trust funded PhD student at KCL, working on ‘Form, function and fashion: health, disease and pedigree dog breeding in the twentieth century’. Alison is one of the co-founders of the Animal History Group.Nicole Gosling is a PhD student at University of Lincoln. She is currently working in collaboration with an inter-disciplinary team of scholars on the Wellcome trust-funded FIELD project (Farm-level Interventions in Endemic Livestock Disease). Her role is to examine the history of lame sheep, focusing on how definitions of lameness and ways of responding to it have changed since 1947, in relation to developments in veterinary science and practice, farming communities and education, agricultural economics and politics, and methods of breeding, keeping and relating to sheep.Scott Hunter is a PhD student at King’s College London working in partnership with the National Horseracing Museum. His project, ‘Animal Celebrity and Mass Spectatorship in British Horseracing, c. 1918 – 2018’, examines the meaning of sporting celebrity for racehorses and the changing nature of public-racehorse relationships as new ways of viewing sport emerged throughout the 20th century.

Animal History Group

Join us for our November seminar with Peter Moser and Andreas Wigger

Working animals (horses, oxen, dogs, cows, breeding bulls, donkeys, mules etc.) played a crucial, but seldom broached role in the process of urbanisation and the modernisation of agriculture in the 19/20th century. For a long time both, the urban transport systems as well as the mechanisation of agriculture, were based on animal power. Therefore, working animals are not, as often perceived, a phenomenon of pre-industrial times, but agents of modernisation.One of the reasons why the relevance of working animals so far has attracted little attention by historians can be found in the official statistics which almost completely ignore them. Since working animals were, as all animals, multifunctional creatures, they were not classified and counted as working beings by the authorities. The (numerical) relevance of working animals has, therefore, to be reconstructed by looking more closely at other sources. A promising supplier of information in this respect are agricultural films which were produced in large numbers since the end of the 19th century – a time when the number of working animals probably was at its highest. Thanks to the activities of the European Rural History Film Association (www.ruralfilms.eu) an increasing number of these films is now accessible via the Online-Portal of the ERHFA.By looking at this emerging “archives of working animals”, the proposed presentation intents to illustrate the relevance and the variety of working animals as well as specific human-animal interactions which occurred when men and animals were working together.

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AHG Seminar - Films as Archives of Working Animals

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