Animal Biography Re Framing Animal Lives 1St Ed Edition Andre Krebber Full Chapter PDF

Animal Biography: Re-framing Animal
Lives 1st ed. Edition André Krebber

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/animal-biography-re-framing-animal-lives-1st-ed-editi
on-andre-krebber/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Animal Rights Education 1st ed. Edition Kai Horsthemke
https://ebookmass.com/product/animal-rights-education-1st-ed-
edition-kai-horsthemke/
Animal Locomotion (C Oabs T Oxford Animal Biology) 2nd

Edition Andrew Biewener
https://ebookmass.com/product/animal-locomotion-c-oabs-t-oxford-
animal-biology-2nd-edition-andrew-biewener/
Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare 1st

ed. Edition Michael J. Gilmour
https://ebookmass.com/product/creative-compassion-literature-and-
animal-welfare-1st-ed-edition-michael-j-gilmour/
Exotic Animal Formulary 5th Edition
https://ebookmass.com/product/exotic-animal-formulary-5th-
edition/
Cow Care In Hindu Animal Ethics Kenneth R. Valpey
https://ebookmass.com/product/cow-care-in-hindu-animal-ethics-
kenneth-r-valpey/
Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World 1st

ed. Edition Martha Chaiklin
https://ebookmass.com/product/animal-trade-histories-in-the-
indian-ocean-world-1st-ed-edition-martha-chaiklin/
Animal Theologians Andrew Linzey
https://ebookmass.com/product/animal-theologians-andrew-linzey/
Small Animal Soft Tissue Surgery 2nd 2nd Edition Eric

Monnet (Ed.)
https://ebookmass.com/product/small-animal-soft-tissue-
surgery-2nd-2nd-edition-eric-monnet-ed/
Animal Diversity 8th Edition, (Ebook PDF)
https://ebookmass.com/product/animal-diversity-8th-edition-ebook-
pdf/
animal
biography
re-framing
animal lives
Edited by
André Krebber
Mieke Roscher
Palgrave Studies in
Animals and Literature
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA
Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing
an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of
human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences
that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology
and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-
disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the
separation of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and
political stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we
locate and understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the
‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as
the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have
codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly
other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to
animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of
animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read
as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human
concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary
animal studies by tracing the engagement of such fi guration with the material
lives of animals. It examines textual c ultures as variously embodying a debt to
or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic
engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate
natural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary
texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the discipline’s
key thematic concerns, genres and critical m ethods. The series focuses on
literary prose and poetry, while also a ccommodating related discussion of the
full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to fine
art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera) with
which English studies now engages.
Series Board:
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649
André Krebber • Mieke Roscher
Editors
Animal Biography
Re-framing Animal Lives
Editors
André Krebber Mieke Roscher
University of Kassel University of Kassel
Kassel, Germany Kassel, Germany
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

ISBN 978-3-319-98287-8 ISBN 978-3-319-98288-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98288-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957697
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover credit: Details/parts of painting “Ocean Being”, by Zhong Hao Chen (2008), oil on
canvas and panel, copyright and owned by the artist
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Gorilla Biscuits
Acknowledgments
The contributions in this volume were selected and adapted from a

conference on animal biographies at the University of Kassel in 2016 that
was generously funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). We
would like to thank the students from the history department at Kassel
University who supported us throughout the conference: Johanna Wurz,
Marc Liebke, Nora Fährmann, Basti Skutta, Tanita Schmidt, and Julian
Herlitze. In addition, we would like to thank Basti Skutta for his careful
support in preparing the manuscript for publication.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: Biographies, Animals and Individuality 1

André Krebber and Mieke Roscher
Part I Explorations 17
2 Living, Biting Monitors, a Morose Howler and Other

Infamous Animals: Animal Biographies in Ethology and
Zoo Biology 19
Matthew Chrulew
3 Finding a Man and his Horse in the Archive? 41

Hilda Kean
4 Recovering and Reconstructing Animal Selves in Literary

Autozoographies 57
Frederike Middelhoff
Part II Reflections 81
5 A Dog’s Life: The Challenges and Possibilities of Animal

Biography 83
Aaron Skabelund
ix
x Contents
6 “We Know Them All”: Does It Make Sense to Create a

Collective Biography of the European Bison? 103
Markus Krzoska
7 Animal Life Stories; or, the Making of Animal Subjects

in Primatological Narratives of Fieldwork 119
Mira Shah
Part III Constructions 139
8 Taxidermy’s Literary Biographies 141

Susan McHugh
9 Caesar: The Rise and Dawn of a Humanimalistic Identity 161

Daniel Wolf
10 Postscript, Posthuman: Werner Herzog’s “Crocodile” at

the End of the World 185
Dominic O’Key
Part IV Experiments 205
11 The Elephant’s I: Looking for Abu’l Abbas 207

Radhika Subramaniam
12 Topsy: The Elephant We Must Never Forget 227

Kim Stallwood
13 Online Animal (Auto-)Biographies: What Does It Mean

When We “Give Animals a Voice?” 243
Margo DeMello
Index 261
Notes on Contributors
Matthew Chrulew is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Culture

and Technology at Curtin University. He is the editor, with Dinesh
Wadiwel, of Foucault and Animals (Brill, 2016), with Deborah Bird Rose
and Thom van Dooren, of Extinction Studies (Columbia, 2017), and, with
Brett Buchanan and Jeffrey Bussolini, of three special issues of Angelaki on
philosophical ethology.
Margo DeMello, Ph.D. is an adjunct faculty member in the Anthrozoology
Master’s Program at Canisius College, the program director for Human-
Animal Studies at the Animals & Society Institute, and has written widely
in the area of human-animal studies.
Hilda Kean is a visiting professor at the University of Greenwich and a
senior honorary research fellow at University College London. As a cul-
tural and public historian she also works on animal-human history. Her
many books include Animal Rights. Political and Social Change in Britain
since 1800 (2000) and The Great Cat and Dog Massacre, University of
Chicago Press (2017–2018). She is jointly editing The Routledge Handbook
for Animal–Human History with Philip Howell, forthcoming in 2018.
André Krebber is Lecturer in History and Theory of Human-Animal
Relations at Kassel University. He researches and teaches in the areas of
human-animal studies, intellectual history, and critical theory. His current
project explores natural beauty as a noninstrumental category of cog-
nition in nineteenth-century philosophy and science.
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Markus Krzoska is Lecturer in History at Justus-Liebig-University

Giessen and University Siegen, Germany. He obtained his doctorate at
Berlin Free University in 2001 and did his habilitation at Giessen in 2012.
He studied history and political science at Mainz University.
Susan McHugh is Professor of English at the University of New England,
USA, and the author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines
(2011) and Dog (2004). She co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Human-
Animal Studies (2014) and Literary Animals Look (2013), as well as a spe-
cial issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.
Frederike Middelhoff is a literary scholar at the University of Würzburg,
Germany, with a special interest in the history and poetics of knowledge. She
is finishing her PhD thesis Literary Autozoographies—Narrating Animal
Life from a First-Person Perspective in German Literature (1787–1922).
Dominic O’Key is a doctoral researcher and teaching assistant at the
University of Leeds. His research explores the concept of the creaturely in
novels by W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee, and Mahasweta Devi.
Mieke Roscher is Assistant Professor for the History of Human-Animal
Relations at the University of Kassel. Her academic interests center on
colonial and gender history as well as animal historiography. Her current
project is on writing the history of animals in the Third Reich.
Mira Shah is a comparatist and cultural studies scholar by training and is
working on a PhD thesis on “Ape and Affect. The Rhetoric of Primatology”
at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
Aaron Skabelund is an associate professor in the Department of History
at Brigham Young University, USA, and the author of Dogs of Empire:
Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World (Cornell
UP, 2011) and “Dogs at War: Military Dogs in Film” in Cinematic
Canines: Dogs and their Work in the Fiction Film (Rutgers UP, 2014).
Kim Stallwood is a vegan animal rights advocate who is an independent
author, consultant, and scholar. He co-founded the Animals and Society
Institute in 2005 and was the volunteer Executive Director of Minding
Animals International (2011–2017). He is the author of Growl: Life Lessons,
Hard Truths, and Bold Strategies from an Animal Advocate (2014).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Radhika Subramaniam is a curator, editor, and writer interested in

urban crises and surprises, particularly crowds, cultures of catastrophe, and
human-animal relationships. She is an associate professor of visual culture
at Parsons School of Design/The New School where she was the first
Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center from
2009 to 2017.
Daniel Wolf is working on his dissertation about the relevance of pictures
for animal-human relations at the University of Kassel. He studied philoso-
phy and sociology, and holds a master’s degree in history and theory of art.
List of Figures
Fig. 5.1 An undated photograph of Hachikō likely lying on the ground

near Shibuya Station (used with permission of Hayashi
Masaharu)84
Fig. 5.2 Photograph of the stuffed Hachikō in the National Science
Museum in Ueno Park, Tokyo. Notice the Pochi Club tag
hanging from his harness. Hayashi Masaharu, ed. Hachikō
bunken shū (Tokyo: Hayashi Masaharu, 1991, used with
permission of the author) 92
Fig. 5.3 Hachikō next to his bronze statue near Shibuya Station,
probably on the day of its dedication, 21 April 1934. On the
side of the photograph someone, perhaps Kobayashi
Kikuzaburō, the Ueno family’s gardener to whom this photo
once belonged, has written, “A bashful (?) Hachikō looking
up at the statue of himself.” Hayashi Masaharu, ed. Hachikō
bunken shū (Tokyo: Hayashi Masaharu, 1991, used with
permission of the author), 252 95
Fig. 9.1 The Road to the Planet of the Apes. © swolf,
schwarzerwolfweisserwolf.com 2016 162
Fig. 9.2 Caesar, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 00:62:19. © swolf,
Fig. 9.3 Motion-capture—Andy Serkis/Caesar at the veterinarian, Rise
of the Planet of the Apes, 00:19:42. © swolf,
Fig. 9.4 Caesar recognizing his leash, Rise of the Planet of the Apes,
00:24:58. © swolf, schwarzerwolfweisserwolf.com 2016 169
xv
xvi List of Figures
Fig. 9.5 Window and Caesar creating the symbol for home/freedom,
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 00:30:30 and 00:41:12. © swolf,
Fig. 9.6 Ape history, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, 00:08:41. © swolf,
Fig. 9.7 Koba, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 00:46:15. © swolf,
Fig. 10.1 Albino alligator. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, dir. Werner
Herzog (2010). © Picturehouse Entertainment / Trafalgar
Releasing. Reproduced under fair dealing 196
Fig. 10.2 Albino alligator close-up. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, dir.
Werner Herzog (2010). © Picturehouse Entertainment /
Trafalgar Releasing. Reproduced under fair dealing 196
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Biographies, Animals

and Individuality
André Krebber and Mieke Roscher
To observe dogs, say, in a park, interact with their kin, including their
human kin, is a curious thing. We are not talking about the distant, dissect-
ing, deterministic kind of observation here, but the kind that suspends
rational correction and attempts to lose itself in its object. In these moments,
it seems almost inescapable to recognize within their play individual person-
alities, tastes, characters and forms of waywardness. Yet, taking animals seri-
ously as individuals, and even more, attempting to substantiate and portray
such individuality in scholarly terms, proves a daunting exercise. As one
approach, scholars have turned to reconstructing and shining light on ani-
mal biographies.1 The biography seems an obvious choice for the challenge.
While history is dominated by attempts that try to standardize, de-individ-
ualize and automatize the behavior of animals, it also proves to be littered
with records of the exceptional lives of unusual animals. Far from being just
1
For example, Baratay, Biographies animales; DeMello, Speaking; McHugh, Animal
Stories; Kean, “Balto”; Pycior, “First Dog”; Witz, “Making”; Fudge, “Animal Lives.”
A. Krebber (*) • M. Roscher

University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany
© The Author(s) 2018 1

A. Krebber, M. Roscher (eds.), Animal Biography,
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98288-5_1
2 A. KREBBER AND M. ROSCHER
a (post)modern sentimental interest, individual animal lives, both real and

fantastic, seem to have captivated the human imagination for a long time.
Examples reach from Bucephalus, antiquity’s enduringly famous horse of
Alexander the Great,2 to Greyfriars Bobby3 and William Bingley’s four-vol-
ume Animal Biography, or, Popular Zoology; Illustrated by Authentic
Anecdotes of the Economy, Habits of Life, Instincts, and Sagacity of the Animal
Creation4 in more recent times. A biography, it is hoped, projects, almost
by definition, the possession of emotions, personhood—a self. Moreover,
the personal element of the biography proves popular and promises to tie a
knot between the biography’s subject and its reader.
Hence, biographical writing surfaces both as an approach to capture
the individuality of animals as well as make animals visible as individuals.
Animal biographies are not meant to say—as one can hear the critics of
such scholarship chuckle—that animals themselves would experience or
even construct their lives in (auto)biographical terms. On the contrary,
animal biography entails exactly the attempt to account for their individu-
ality without having to read their minds, reconstruct their feelings or infer
their intentions. As such, animal biographies remain external to the cogni-
tive experience of the animals’ worlds and their relations to it. Rather, the
animal biography responds to and tries to capture our experience of other
animals as individuals, with their own personalities, idiosyncrasies and each
and every one with a self of its own, as well as our desire to lend voice and
recognition to these individual creatures. We understand this enterprise as
an attempt to make animal subjects visible as each possessing individual
traits of their own. It is an attempt to study and show cultural and local
characteristics of both groups of animals and certain individuals within
those groups, with the hope of breaking the mold of identity that lumps
together all animals as principally the same. Finally, the writing of animal
biography also points to the intimate interlacing of the lives of animals and
humans. With this volume, we want to explore the practicalities of refram-
ing animal lives through the biography, but also to evaluate the biography
as theoretical frame for animal lives.
Winkes, “Boukephalas.”
2
Kean, “Exploration.”
3
4
Bingley, Animal Biography (first published in 1802 in 3 volumes, noteworthy as: Animal
Biography; or, Authentic Anecdotes of the Lives, Manners and Economy of the Animal Creation,
Arranged According to the System of Linnaeus).
INTRODUCTION: BIOGRAPHIES, ANIMALS AND INDIVIDUALITY 3
(Animal) Biography: A Historical Synopsis

Coming from the Greek words of bios for life and graphein for writing,
biography has a long tradition. For historians, the method of biography
has been a longstanding tool in recounting the past. By way of exemplify-
ing a life history, one hoped also to reconstruct the historical possibilities
of one person’s life in the past. Studying a human life in its entirety by
considering the historical context and the interdependencies between the
individual and society can therefore rightly be termed one of the master
narratives in historiography. Looking as far back as antiquity, one cannot
fail to notice that recounting the life of so-called great men is the most
dominant and maybe one of the oldest forms of literary as well as historical
narration. Over the centuries it has remained a widely used practice for
recounting and interpreting historical processes. As such, it was not always
clear what the genre of biography entails, as it was flexible enough to con-
tain encyclopedic accounts, lyrical verses and memoirs. It was usually
defined by its chronological narration, its sequencing and the presentation
of important occurrences in the life presented. However, the literary tradi-
tion of biography from its beginning strayed from these rather rigid speci-
fications, which led to a distinction between an esthetic and a scholarly
biographical genre.5 That these differences have become significantly
blurred following Hayden White’s critique of the distinction between facts
and fiction has also impacted on the genre of biography.6
Biographical research may be much younger than biography itself, but
here also there has been a considerable amount of disagreement on what
the term implies. The research, depending on which discipline is consulted,
was challenged and rejuvenated especially by advances in oral history and
narration, as well as in women’s and gender studies.7 The sole focus on the
so-called great man as the presumed only agent influencing the course of
history has been called into question by these new perspectives. The “note-
worthiness” of the biographical subject has been significantly altered, if not
abolished, especially with the advent of the biographical method in sociol-
ogy. Even if not explicitly addressed however, this “noteworthiness” is the
central factor for why early attempts at animal biographies have been dis-
missed as banal or profane. Some say that the general denunciation of
5
Zymner, “Biographie.”
6
White, Tropics.
7
Ferres, “Gender.”
biography as a suitable tool was based on the assumption that all lives are
inherently constructed. Likewise, the construction of certain lives as privi-
leged over others has led to some historians questioning the suitability of
biography as a tool for recreating the past in general.8 More to the point,
however, is the fact that the influence of the social sciences, especially in the
1970s, and the linguistic turn have together had an immense effect on
biographical research, also with regard to the innate interdisciplinary char-
acter of the biographical genre.9 Thus, what formerly had been character-
ized and described as a constant shift between the focus on the individual
or on society was now being reread as a way of drawing attention to the
abilities of the individual and the individual’s agency.10 The acting subject,
his or her practices and dynamic interaction with the surroundings were to
become central for the idea of the individual’s “making” of his or her biog-
raphy. The question of animal agency can therefore be regarded as being
closely linked to the question of animal biography without however being
identical. In addition, biographical research has reacted to transformations
in society. Historians have therefore taken to micro-historical approaches
and the history of everyday life in their attempts to retell individual biog-
raphies, whereas the method of collective biography has been applied in
ways that include social, political and structural historical dimensions.
Additionally, and in the wake of new historicism and new criticism, the nar-
rative structures of the biography as, for example, marked by its chrono-
logical sequencing have been questioned. Special emphasis is increasingly
being placed on the narrative construction of both text and identities, but
also the tension, interrelation and incongruence between individual and
socio-historical context. Chronological approaches are giving way to the-
matic structures, closed unified images are surrendered for fragmentary
sketches, and the interference of the representational means and forms of
scholarly biographical accounts with the apprehension of the biographical
subjects are taken into consideration.11 Pierre Bourdieu’s remarks on the
“illusion of biography,” which famously questioned the sense of trying to
recreate a life without taking recourse to its many defining relations and
structures by comparing it to a subway map,12 serves here as a reminder,
8
See, for example, Gradmann, “Geschichte.”
9
For an overview see Hamilton, Biography.
10
See also Baratay, Biographies animales, 13–20.
11
Klein and Schnicke, “20. Jahrhundert,” 264.
12
Bourdieu, “L’illusion biographique.”
that the nature of biography is still to be regarded as undetermined. The

question is whether this serves as an invitation to or a warning against try-
ing to incorporate animals into these biographical frameworks.
Methodological Layouts
As such, animal biographies, like biographies in general, ultimately remain
constructions that attempt to trace a more or less coherent image of the life
of an individual, as Bourdieu pointed out. Within this framework, biographies
come in a variety of shapes and forms. This might be truer for nonhuman
animals still, who themselves most likely do not care much for casting their
lives in terms of biographies. Biographies can be smooth and uneventful, but
they can also be broken, fractured, fragmented and fragile. They can be col-
lective and shared, yet they can also be deeply individual and isolated, distinct
from any other biography. For some individuals or even groups of individuals,
biographies can be comprehensively recoverable, but they can also be partial,
interrupted and sketchy. As a consequence, within biographical writing, the
real and the fictional always and necessarily pervade each other.13 It is the task
of the biographer to organize the remnants into a coherent story; it is he or
she who creates meaning through the organization of fragments and sources.
This, of course, is not peculiar to animal biographies, but rather the standard
mode of operation for historians and literary scholars alike.
Following from these thoughts, one of the most challenging method-
ological problems of biographies, regardless of whether their subjects are
animals or humans, remains the question of what constitutes an individual
life and whether it is the individual life at all that is to be the focus of a
biography, as some definitions still hold.14 This stands in contrast to the
many attempts at biographies that use the individual’s life to offer a narra-
tive background for illustrating specific socio-spatial contexts, or that are
interested in a whole social group, which they try to capture by using the
sum of the fragments provided by individual biographies.15 These attempts
have found their application in the writing of collective biographies, in
which a group or a network is being portrayed by a comparative analysis
of their lives. Prosography, as this approach is also called, is defined as the
investigation of the common characteristics of an historical group, whose
13
Pycior, “Public and Private,” 177–178.
14
See, for example, Hornung, “Anthropology.”
15
Schnicke, “Begriffsgeschichte.”
individual biographies may be largely untraceable.16 Methodologically,

these approaches rely on the collection of large data sets, including key
information such as education, place of birth, profession of parents and so
forth, which are then read against the backdrop of historical develop-
ments. Lately, attention also has been directed at the encounter between
humans and animals as a heuristic tool.17 The question, to which this vol-
ume hopes to provide some answers, remains whether or not such meth-
ods are applicable to animals—or whether they can and maybe even must
be enriched, for example, by ethological and ethnological approaches.
Using collective biographies in the traditional human-centered way is also
seen as a way to create situated subjectivities. Thus, by turning to telling
and reframing animal lives through the method of biography, we also hope
to remake animal identities.
More than the writing of human biographies, the writing of animal biog-
raphies then relies fundamentally on interdisciplinary efforts. Even though
animals are present throughout the array of cultural documents and arti-
facts, at least within the last two or three centuries a lot of knowledge about
animals has been collected within the natural sciences. So while there is
much information available about animals and their lives, the task now, as
has been argued by Erica Fudge among others,18 is to submit this knowl-
edge to new and critical analyses in order to perceive animals in new lights.
This requires recalibrating the pairing of methods and sources by crossing
disciplinary boundaries on both levels. As a consequence, the writing of
animal biographies should remain open, in our view, to a wide range of data
and sources. However, because we see this volume as an introduction to
animal biography as a methodological as well as theoretical approach, we
want to limit these methodological attempts and place them within the
framework of a humanities scholarship. Hence, this volume focuses on
reframing the animal biography in historical, cultural and literary studies.
Theoretical Promises
Narrowing in on the biography, this volume is not about animal auto-
biographies. We are neither focusing on the self-expression of the animal,
nor, as suggested earlier, do we turn to the animal biography as a way of
16
See, for example, Booth, How to Make it.
17
Davies and Gannon, “Collective Biography.”
18
Fudge, “Animal Lives.”
rendering the animal’s mind, thoughts and way of experiencing into

speech, as DeMello does with her fine collection of essays Speaking for
Animals.19 Instead, we are interested in evaluating the constructing of
animal biographies as a way of making visible and honoring animals as
individuals externally, from historical sources, lived experiences, the bodies
of animals. The two perspectives are closely related, of course, in that they
share a desire to honor, capture and make noticeable the animal as an
agent, who is individually self-determined, at least to some degree, and in
taking seriously the parts animals play in society; likewise the two perspec-
tives are not mutually exclusive (F. Middelhoff’s and M. DeMello’s con-
tributions to this volume make this obvious). But whereas the autobiography
approaches animal agency by trying to bring to light the self-experience of
an animal other, the biography attempts to reveal agency through external
markers and through the intertwinement with others and the historical,
socio-cultural context. Through the biography, individuals and suppressed
groups hence become visible as social, rather than cognitive actors.20
Yet, while biography and the individual are inseparably intertwined,
they far from simply and unequivocally conform to each other. When the
biographers of the nineteenth century approached their protagonists as
personifications of the socio-political conditions of their time, both study-
ing and writing history through the lives of a few powerful men, they
tended to overwrite the individuality of their protagonists and identify
them with the social realities of their times. As such, these biographies,
while apparently making the life of one individual their principal material,
really proved de-individualizing—even if it was not to the detriment of the
perceived individual grandeur of their subjects. Thus simultaneously de-
and hyper-individualizing, biography’s relationship with the individual
appears deeply ambiguous. The critique that formed against such bio-
graphical privileging and elevation of a few over the many during the first
half of the twentieth century, in turn, did not necessarily elevate the indi-
vidual more broadly through acknowledgment of a more widespread biog-
raphy-worthiness of the individual as such. Rather, its main thrust was
directed at the identification of the actions of some individuals with history
itself that extended to these individuals near total stature over the course
of societies by reducing everyone else to mere extras on the set of a 1960s
epic film. More than on individuals, the door to democratization of the
19
DeMello, “Introduction.”
20
Cf. Klein and Schnicke, “20. Jahrhundert,” 259.
biography recoiled exemplarily, if opening on the individual nevertheless

potentially thereby as well. The demolition of the nineteenth century
biography then lent voice to the suffering of repressed groups—people of
color, women, workers—while also highlighting the individual’s fragility
and fragmentation by emphasizing the limitation of its power. Thus, the
relationship between biography and individual is precarious. As a conse-
quence, the studying of biography today has moved away from the idea of
a coherent narrative while also always reflecting upon the process of medi-
ation that is inherent to the narration and production of the biography
(and, indeed, all knowledge).
It is precisely this theoretical insight, however, that not only makes the
biography a possible approach to the consideration of other lives, but
places it as a competent voice within the conundrum of how one might be
able to speak about and represent the individual experience of the other.
One of the major critiques of a social and cultural reevaluation of animals
that intends to recognize animals as autonomous, self-acting individuals is
the anthropocentrism that is argued to be inherent in their every represen-
tation.21 In the tension between the biographer on the one hand and the
particular object of a biography on the other—that is, the challenge of
reproducing and invoking the life and experiences of another individual
subject—the biography as a scholarly genre has always been imbued with
the same epistemological challenge, only in relation to other humans.
Indeed, it is the mainstay of the biography to give form to the other. As
such, the biographed is always also the product of the biographer, while
the perspective of biographer and biographed cannot be neatly separated.
Reframing animal lives through a biographical lens thus does not by itself
lead to the envisioned emancipation of their protagonists by way of their
individualization. Yet the alternative to a crude scientific objectivism that
the biography represents, including its receptiveness to the anecdotal, its
transgression of the delimitation between science and art, and the space it
leaves for differentiation and deviance, holds specific promises for human-
animal studies. Lurking ephemerally between the lines of the discursive
aether of human-animal studies, the individuality of the animal breaks to
the surface in spontaneous eruptions, before descending back into the
ineffable. Biography might provide a footing for these notions of a life
peculiar to animals and help to give it form. That Virginia Woolf, who
21
On the last point, see, for example, the discussion of anthropocentrism in Prade,
Sprachoffenheit, 35–43.
famously democratized the biography by claiming that “anyone who has

lived a life, and left a record of that life, [is] worthy of a biography,”22
chose to write a biography on behalf of an animal, thence seems little
surprising.23
Needless to say, that significant theoretical and methodological ques-
tions remain. Is the focus on a few pronounced animal personalities (or
even a few specific collectives of animals) not just shifting the perimeter of
the collective, without any potential for moving beyond the anthropocen-
trism in our relation to animals? What about the vast number of individual
animals who do not leave distinguished marks? Do they not become even
more invisible than before? Can collective biographies compensate for
such limitations? In allusion to Bourdieu, we might also ask if the concept
of biography is at all useful for the recovering of individuality. Additionally,
if we consider the concept of the biography limiting for humans, is the
construction of animal biographies not counterproductive, especially if we
want to honor the individuality and agency of animals? Do individuals
even have biographies in the first place—or, coming from the opposite
direction, is the construction of a biography a necessary precondition for
subjectivity? And do animals in particular have biographies, or is their
experience instead rather momentary, and the writing of animal biogra-
phies therefore entirely an anthropomorphic and anthropocentric con-
struction? Would this extend to all species? Or are biographies peculiar to
human, and maybe just a few other nonhuman species? The purpose of
this volume is to pursue and think through some of these challenges.
For our opening part, titled “Explorations,” we choose to trace the
appearance of animal biography back to biographical, not historical, inter-
species beginnings. Whether by studying the lives of animal ethologists and
biologists and their passion for studying animals, by looking for animals in
archival material and finding an intimate relationship between a man and a
horse, or by questioning whether a fictional animal is based on a real life
animal in contact to the text’s author, animal biographies are discovered
and explored through interlinkages with human caretakers, riders, keepers,
feeders, admirers, observers. These explorations may be the result of a
well-designed research program or a mere coincidental stumbling over a
life influencing other lives. Matthew Chrulew’s attempt to frame animal
biographies is placed at the intersection of these poles. By sketching out
22
Woolf, “Art of Biography,” 226–227.
23
Woolf, Flush.
how “charismatic or confounding creatures shape the life of the animal

scientist, affect their interests and ideas, impel a drive to biological knowl-
edge, [and] compel the writing of animal lives,” he not only shows how
biographies of scientists have been imprinted by the animals they encoun-
ter, but how animal biographies lie at the center of their descriptive frame-
work. Using the narrative evidence of the scientist’s encounters, especially
those of the Swiss zoologist Heini Hediger and curator-emeritus of the
Bronx zoo, Lee Crandall, as a source, he traces back the historical apprecia-
tion of animals as biographical subjects in the work of historian Eric Baratay
and philosophical ethologist Dominique Lestel. Upon closer examination,
autobiography, animal biography and zoo-biography become, as Chrulew
argues, interwoven, opening up the chance to follow not only the famous
but the common animals into their dens, cages and enclosures. In her take
on working as an animal historian in the archive, Hilda Kean shows that it
is not only scientists’ accounts through which these biographical glimpses
can be retrieved. Although exploration is a routine endeavor of any archival
work, it is unexpected discoveries while “filling gaps” in a story that lead to
encounters with unexpected individuals. Arguing that these glimpses may
be just part of a larger picture, she exemplifies how the relational and often
emotional connections between humans and animals can provide a starting
point for a biographical account that represents at least that side of an ani-
mal’s existence that is shared with human beings. Frederike Middelhoff, in
her chapter on literary autozoographies, questions the aim of finding an
“actual,” metaphorical meaning behind an animal’s narrative voice. Instead
proposing to utilize species-specific and indeed zoological readings when
approaching and studying such texts, she highlights the role literature can
play in coming to terms with the epistemological, cultural, socio-historical
and esthetic complexities that animal selves present. Taking the German
Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffman and his novel The Life and Opinions of
the Tomcat Murr as an example, she suggests that animal traces within
these texts need to be explored by taking apart the all too obvious relation-
ship between narrator and author, and evaluating the empirical founda-
tions of the text in search for the autobiographical selves.
The volume’s second part turns to “Reflections” on the biography as
an opening for a deeper conversation with socio-political as well as cul-
tural contexts. Here, animal biographies serve as an entry point for pro-
viding a narration that goes far beyond the individual’s life story, even if
the individual life remains a focal point. The animal biographies in this
section point beyond a narrow biological confinement to an interspecies
social meta-level, without, however, depriving the protagonists of their

individuality or making the animals disappear altogether. This holds true
particularly for those animal individuals of whom a wide array of source
material, including taxidermic evidence, is available. Reflecting upon what
is, can and should be told beyond the limitation of reconstructing a life is
at the heart of these chapters, which also entails reflecting on methodolo-
gies. Whether it is the contextual embedment within national or even
nationalistic master narratives or the perceiving of primatologists’ obser-
vations, they show how animal biographies might surpass the narration of
the biological individual. Hachikō , the Akita dog of international fame
and main character in Aaron Skabelund’s contribution, makes this par-
ticularly obvious. Skabelund reflects on the challenges and possibilities of
composing animal biographies, addressing especially the “subalternity” of
animals as biographical agents, and intertwines these with questions of
materiality (not only of the animal body but also of the source evidence
that he relies upon) and temporality. Biographical discourses change after
the death of the biographical subject and while this might be true also for
humans, the culture of remembering animals seems to leave more room
for instrumentalization, as Skabelund points out. He thus shows how the
representation of the animal is highly adaptable to nationalistic idealiza-
tion, and what can be gained by disentangling the individual life from the
political agenda as well as by taking into account matters of breed.
Breeding also takes center stage in Markus Krzsoka’s evaluation of animals
who are presumed “wild”: in this case the European Bison, a species
driven to near extinction at the turn of the twentieth century. Having a
whole group of animals as object of a biographical account, the article
reflects the possibility of writing a collective biography of the species based
on the yearly pedigree book for all living specimens and their descendants.
Krzoska asks whether these collective identities translate back into the
possibility of tracing individuality, or not. Similar questions are raised in
Mira Shah’s chapter. While asserting that traditionally, scientific accounts
of animals have worked toward an obscuring of individuality, she deduces
that by reflecting on the popular scientific by-products of ethological
fieldwork, in her case the biographies of primatologists, one cannot fail to
note that it is individual animals that are being followed, observed, docu-
mented and described, sometimes for years, decades, even whole lives.
She therefore suggests that autobiographical narratives and “research
memoirs” of primatological fieldwork create textual animal subjects that
endow the animals with literary agency. Reflecting both on the practice of
primatological fieldwork as well as on the narrative structures of the texts,

she stresses that subjectivity is created via animal biography.
Part III takes a look at what we have dubbed “Constructions” of ani-
mal biographies. Bearing in mind that all biographies are the result of an
assemblage, an agglomeration and ordering of data, text, information,
material and immaterial evidence, the means of construction—concretely,
taxidermy and film—are discussed here. The production of certain biog-
raphies in visual media particularly and their ubiquity in popular culture
generates icons that often seem to stand in for whole species and stereo-
typed animal-human relationships. A closer observation reveals, however,
that this prioritization must not be the case, and that the construction of
animals and their biographies instead comes in forms that bridge rather
than conceal the difference between the whole and the individual. The
interest in determining whether individuality is a precondition for con-
structing the historical subject lies behind Susan McHugh’s reflection on
the intersection of taxidermy and literary representations. The challenge
for McHugh is that taxidermic displays adhere to a collective narrative of
both the object itself and of its provenance. In a way similar to the case
of Hachikō , the life after death inherent in the taxidermic display makes
for a history different from the exhibit’s previous life. McHugh therefore
suggests a genealogical reading of both literary representations and his-
torical accounts, in order to disentangle the constructions of life, death
and afterlife, past, present and future as well as culture and biology. Using
contemporary fiction about taxidermy and taxidermists as sources along-
side taxidermied animals, she moreover reflects on animal biography as
an esthetic formation. Esthetics come also into play in Daniel Wolf ’s
dissection of the post-human dystopia represented by the rebooted

Planet of the Apes franchise, and its main characters Caesar and Koba,
apparently prime examples of animal biographies. Taking Deleuze and
Guattari’s as well as Haraway’s concepts of becoming as foundation, this
chapter describes the evolutionary process of constructing identities that
are regarded as human or nonhuman. Surprisingly, the concepts of
human and nonhuman are seldom interwoven despite the apes’ anthro-
pomorphized description. Wolf ’s detailed analysis of claims of anthropo-
morphism therefore asks for a disentanglement of categories of similarity
and the construction of identities. An equally post-human perspective is
presented in Dominic O’Key’s chapter on the crocodile in the postscript
to Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams from
2010. Herzog presents, in O’Key’s reading, a speculative biography of
animals depicted in the Chauvet cave in France who, in a postscript, are
supposed to have outlived the human race. This framing of time then
becomes one of the central questions in the construction of a biography.
Drawing from George Bataille, Jacques Derrida and Bernhard Stiegler,
O’Key suggests that matters of birth and death, beginning and collapse,
technology and time create strange temporalities that impact upon the
possibilities of writing biographies. Furthermore, the opening up of
spaces by decentering the anthropos while creating a post-human con-
text—a context, however, that is still inscribed by former human pres-
ences—to some extend confirms the ontological separation between
humans and animals. By presenting a biography of the albino crocodiles
of the cave, O’Key illustrates how, in their constructedness, animals are
“always irrevocably marked” and simultaneously “mutated.”
The final part of the volume offers “Experiments” in potential form,
narration and embodied constitution of animal biographies. The three
chapters address, each in their own way, the underlying human relation-
ships that inform the presentation of biographies, through experimental
fieldwork, concerns for animal rights, and the creating of profiles for one’s
beloved animal companion. Moreover, these chapters also show how cre-
ative writing processes and social media help to create particular forms of
animal biographies that might trigger animal activism and concerns for
animal well-being, historical interest as well as the literary imagination. By
way of textual fragmentation, Radhika Subramaniam presents the animal,
his human companion and the writer/researcher as three coordinates in
the construction of the story, and the animal biography as result of their
story-telling. Following the tracks and traces of the elephant Abu’l Abbas
and his mahout from the court of the Caliph of Baghdad, Harun al Rashid,
to Aachen, Germany, where he was given to Charlemagne, Subramaniam
constructs a credible tale of this elephant’s travels through considering the
intertwined experiences of intimacy, isolation, confinement, migration and
intelligibility, while also addressing the challenges of telling stories across
species and time. By introducing human characters who accompany the
elephant, she creates a “plausible fiction” that also questions the linearity of
biographical projects and disassembles the composition of movement and
time in an attempt to listen for and hear Abu’l Abbas’ calls, the “elephant-
like tricks that can travel over distances,” both temporal and spatial, as one
might add. An elephant also takes center stage in the account of Topsy
presented in the following biographical eulogy by Kim Stallwood. Putting
the life and (deplorable) death of Topsy in the framework of the building
of the American industrial and entertainment empire, but also the history
of zoos and circuses, this chapter calls for an empathic and compassionate
reading of all sources available, moreover thickened by contemporary

accounts on elephant behavior. The granting of rights to animals should
thus include the right to a biographical narration that accepts the claim that
animals are subjects, at the very least, of their lives. As such, Stallwood
points out, writing animal biographies can help to give back to animals
some of the autonomy they routinely are denied in a human-centered
world. Margo DeMello, finally, takes up Stallwood’s cue in her look at the
creation of animal biographies on social media platforms like Twitter,
Facebook and Instagram, as well as specialized animal sites, such as Catster,
Dogster or Bunspace. Online animals, as DeMello shows, serve as more
than the voice of a human writer who constructs fictional accounts of their
pet(s), but can also be used to promote better treatment of animals beyond
the digital sphere. While the very nature of online animal biographies may
be anthropomorphic, DeMello argues, they may also create precedents for
a new understanding of animal subjectivity and identity.
Works Cited
Baratay, Éric. Biographies animales. Des vies retrouvées. Paris: Seuil, 2017.
Bingley, William. Animal Biography, or, Popular Zoology: Illustrated by Authentic
Anecdotes of the Economy, Habits of Life, Instincts, and Sagacity of the Animal
Creation. 4 vols. London: Philips, 1829.
Booth, Alison. How to Make it as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from
Victoria to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “L’illusion biographique”. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales
62.1 (1986): 69–72.
Davies, Bronwyn and Susanne Gannon. “Collective Biography and the Entangled
Enlivening of Being”. International Review of Qualitative Research 5.4 (2012):
357–377.
DeMello, Margo, ed. Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing.
New York: Routledge, 2013.
———. “Introduction”. In Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical
Writing, edited by Margo DeMello, 1–14. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Ferres, Kay. “Gender, Biography and the Public Sphere”. In Mapping Lives: The
Uses of Biography, edited by Peter France and William St Clair, 303–309.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Fudge, Erica. “Animal Lives – Erica Fudge Asks If, and How, a Biography of an
Animal Might Be Written.” History Today 54.10 (2004): 21–26.
Gradmann, Christoph. “Geschichte, Fiktion und Erfahrung – kritische
Anmerkungen zur neuerlichen Aktualität der historischen Biographie.”
Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL) 17.2
(1992): 1–16.
Hamilton, Nigel. Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Hornung, Alfred. “Anthropology and Life Writing.” In Encyclopedia of Life
Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Form, edited by Margaretta Jolly,
38–41. London: Routledge, 2001.
Kean, Hilda. “Balto, the Alaskan Dog and His Statue in New Yorks Central Park:
Animal Representation and National Heritage.” International Journal of
Heritage Studies 15.5 (2009): 413–430.
———. “An Exploration of the Sculptures of Greyfriars Bobby, Edinburgh,
Scotland, and the Brown Dog, Battersea, South London, England.” Society
and Animals 11.4 (2003): 353–373.
Klein, Christian and Falko Schnicke. “20. Jahrhundert.” In Handbuch Biographie:
Methoden, Traditionen, Theorien, edited by Christian Klein, 251–264. Stuttgart:
Metzler, 2009.
McHugh, Susan. Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Prade, Juliane. Sprachoffenheit: Mensch, Tier und Kind in der Autobiographie.
Königshausen & Neumann Würzburg, 2013.
Pycior, Helena. “The Public and Private Lives of ‘First Dogs’: Warren G. Harding’s
Laddie Boy and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fala.” In: Beastly Natures: Animals,
Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, 176–204.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010.
———. “The Making of the ‘First Dog’: President Warren G. Harding and Laddie
Boy.” Society and Animals 13.2 (2005): 109–138.
Schnicke, Falko. “Begriffsgeschichte: Biographie und verwandte Termini.” In
Handbuch Biographie: Methoden, Traditionen, Theorien, edited by Christian
Klein, 1–6. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009.
White, Hayden V. Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
Winkes, Rolf. “Boukephalas.” In Miscellanea Mediterranea (Archaeologia
Transatlantica XVIII), edited by R. Ross Holloway, 101–107. Providence:
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World, 2000.
Witz, Leslie. “The Making of an Animal Biography: Huberta’s Journey into South
African Natural History, 1928–1932.” Kronos 30 (2004): 138–166.
Woolf, Virginia. “The Art of Biography.” In Collected Essays, vol. 4, edited by
Leonard Woolf, 221–228. London: Hogarth Press, 1967.
———. Flush: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1933.
Zymner, Rüdiger. “Biographie als Gattung?” In Handbuch Biographie: Methoden,
Traditionen, Theorien, edited by Christian Klein, 7–12. Stuttgart: Metzler,
2009.
PART I
Explorations
CHAPTER 2
Living, Biting Monitors, a Morose Howler

and Other Infamous Animals: Animal
Biographies in Ethology and Zoo Biology
Matthew Chrulew
Autobiographical Animals
The early lives of biologists are often marked by transformative encounters
with individual animals. The volume Leaders in the Study of Animal
Behavior: Autobiographical Perspectives, a collection of first-person essays
overviewing the lives and careers of foundational scientists in ethology and
comparative psychology, is punctuated by such impactful experiences.1
Curiosity about the natural world is a common characteristic averred in
these accounts, many of which feature childhood menageries or experi-
ences of awe and wonder in the wild. Common too are defining interac-
tions with specific, singular creatures that solidify this interest and mark
the author from a young age.
1
Dewsbury, Animal Behavior: Autobiographical Perspectives. This volume was followed by
a second over two decades later: Drickamer and Dewsbury, Animal Behavior: Second
Generation.
M. Chrulew (*)
Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia
© The Author(s) 2018 19

A. Krebber, M. Roscher (eds.), Animal Biography,
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98288-5_2
20 M. CHRULEW
Entomologist Vincent G. Dethier writes evocatively of his fascinating

“first acquaintance with a live butterfly [that] resulted entirely from the
initiative of the butterfly.”2 Ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt opens his
autobiographical sketches with an early childhood memory of responding
excitedly to a goldfish, and further “a mosaic of pictorial memories in my
mind—like short film scenes—of anthills in our garden with ants transport-
ing caterpillars, of spiders that I fed with flies, and of toads swimming in a
nearby pond that I caught and released in our garden.” He writes that “In
every person’s life, key experiences can be traced that in a decisive way
direct the growth of one’s individual interest, and one’s outlook on the
world,” describing a memorable trip to the Alps with his father.3 The pio-
neering cognitive ethologist Donald R. Griffin relates a “vivid memory
[…] of a farmer’s boy carrying home a dead possum he had trapped”4 and
of his yearning for trapping that, under stern encouragement, mutated into
cave expeditions for the purposes of bat-banding. Eckhard H. Hess reflects
on his childhood keeping of animals, “that commonplace activity so usual
in those who later become ethologists.” Indeed, he writes, “Konrad Lorenz
once said that all of the ethologists he knew carried out this boyhood activ-
ity,” which meant “taking on of a responsibility for providing an environ-
ment suitable for that particular animal and seeing to it that normal activities
could take place in such a period of confinement” or else releasing the
animal. This activity, he believes, “has something to do with the nature of
the kind of research” he went on to perform, citing R.F. Ewer’s remark
that “Ethologists are scientists who love the animals which they use in their
research.”5 John A. King, whose research focused on the behavioural
impact of early life experiences on animals, writes in his piece titled “Those
Critical Periods of Social Reinforcement” of a singular
childhood realization: I like animals. Somewhere in the ontogeny of most

people, there seems to be a switch that turns some, as children, onto animals
and others away from animals. Rather than an on-off switch, the early expe-
riences with animals resemble a throttle that is at rest in some children and
pushed ever onward in others until their entire lives involve animals in some
respect. My throttle is full speed ahead.6
2
Dewsbury, Animal Behavior: Autobiographical Perspectives, 45.
3
Ibid., 69.
4
Ibid., 121.
5
Ibid., 183.
6
Ibid., 205–206.
LIVING, BITING MONITORS, A MOROSE HOWLER AND OTHER INFAMOUS… 21
The contribution of Heini Hediger, the influential Swiss zoo biologist,

animal psychologist and zoo director, fits into this genre. He professes
from a very early age an excessive curiosity about animals and a peculiar
habit for collecting them. He jokes of having been “imprinted on zoos”
(as a surrogate mother of sorts, it is implied) in early visits with nurses to
the zoological garden in Basel that as an adult he would come to direct. “I
wanted to be in contact with animals and, consequently, assembled an
impressive menagerie” that expanded from plush toys to living creatures
like snakes and owls.7 This growing collection, which distracted from his
schoolwork, grew into expeditions to forests and swamps and, from there,
journeys to Morocco and the South Pacific, where he observed and wrote
about animals, on to biological studies at university and, ultimately, a dis-
tinguished and eventful career in zoological gardens.
It is a set of encounters with individual monitor lizards that he describes
most strikingly. In 1929, he travelled as an assistant on an 18-month eth-
nological expedition during which he collected many specimens for his
own studies and others that he donated to the Basel Museum of Natural
History, where for a short time he later became curator of zoology. But his
true inclinations lay elsewhere: “something was missing; I was working
exclusively with dead animals when I was oriented toward living animals.”8
He had captured and kept monitor lizards during his stays on various
South Pacific islands. The aggressive animals, he writes, “were remarkable
in that they soon became completely tame. At first, I chained them to a
post beneath our bungalow. When I approached them, I was greeted with
threats, lashing tails, and defecation. After just a few days, however, I could
feed them crabs and mice by hand without any problems.”9 This tameness
allowed him to observe many new facts about monitor behaviour, their
prowess at climbing, running and swimming. It also resulted in a new rela-
tionship that profoundly affected him, as upon their departure, “when it
was time to put it in the alcohol tank, I was unable to perform my duty.
Instead, I declared him officially taboo in the presence of the local chieftain
and turned him loose.”10 This aspiring zoo director, oriented towards liv-
ing animals, could not bring himself, in the interests of museological col-
lection, to kill and preserve and thus objectify as a “specimen” for scientific
7
Hediger, “Lifelong Attempt,” 145.
8
Ibid., 152.
9
Ibid., 148–149.
10
Ibid., 149.
22 M. CHRULEW
knowledge this specific, living monitor with whom, in the process of tam-
ing, he had developed a relationship—asymmetrical, certainly, but none-
theless social.
This was not the only monitor lizard to profoundly mark Hediger’s
life: “Strangely enough,” he writes, “it was a monitor […] a 1.6-meter-
long specimen, that gave me my only serious work-related injury in a
career that spanned thirty-five years. At a press conference in which
everything was going wrong, as is sometimes the case, I was bitten above
the wrist […] an injury that has since hampered my writing and per-
plexed graphologists.”11 Hediger was exceedingly proud of his injury
record, achieved, he argued, through careful attention to animal behav-
iour, knowledge of their psychological needs that enabled the expert
mediation of all animal-environment and animal-human encounters in
captivity. This rare misunderstanding fatefully punctures his writing
about animals. It has indeed perplexed, if not stymied, my own archival
research into Hediger’s zoo biology.12 With a defiant bite, this anony-
mous yet singular lizard left its trace and marked those of its keeper. It
entered into Hediger’s auto-zoobiography, and thus into the annals of
animal behaviour science.
It is revealing that these records of scientific beginnings—offering
insights into both the institutional development of a field, and the personal
development of its protagonists—are so regularly marked by such forma-
tive face-to-face encounters with familiars.13 Time and again, charismatic
or confounding creatures shape the life of the animal scientist, affect their
interests and ideas, impel a drive to biological knowledge and compel the
writing of animal lives. Intriguingly, the researchers often use technical
terms and concepts to frame these early encounters, whether speaking in
Lorenzian terms of “imprinting” on the zoo as Hediger does, recounting
their early memories as meaningful “engrams” or reflecting on the signifi-
cance, in their own ontogenetic development, of their social experiences of
nonhuman others. Their mature research into the nature of nurture and of
learning in orienting an organism within its environment thus provides a
11
Ibid.
12
I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
(Ernst Keller European Travelling Fellowship, 2013), the Zürich Zoo and the Australian
Research Council (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, DE160101531) in making
this research possible.
13
On the developmental and pedagogical significance of encounters with animals, see, for
example, Marchesini, “Zoomimesis.”
lexicon with which to frame the early experiences that, they tell us, impelled
that very research. Writing, life and biology are tightly interwoven in this
distinctive genre of self-reflection. It is at the same time a genre through
which the lives of individual animals come to be narrated. These are not
objectified or quantified but singular beings who by virtue of their qualita-
tive distinctness and particular entanglement become an impactful part of
the development and narration of scientific lives. Though far from com-
plete animal biographies, these anecdotal episodes nonetheless relate sig-
nificant life-shaping experiences, whether based on chance encounter,
purposeful pursuit or shared life in common, that are remembered and
given meaning as setting the researchers on the path to foundational scien-
tific endeavour, to a life devoted to understanding animals.
Animal Biography
Even from the earliest stages of the discipline, these “autobiographical
perspectives” speak to the development, in the twentieth century, of new
possibilities for comprehending and narrating the lives of animals, and to
their intricate and multifaceted discursive and practical underpinnings.
They tell us that both the desire and the opportunity to understand and
describe animal conduct come from encounter and from shared life, and
that such relationships have been significant in inspiring new ethological
models and theories. And these new scientific perspectives—not just those
of the European and American men described above but, particularly, later
innovations and discoveries achieved by a wider range of scientists—have
themselves made possible new forms of animal biography: not just in the
genre of decisive childhood encounters, but more comprehensively and
zoocentrically, in stories centred on the lives and distinctive characteristics
of individual animals themselves.
How have the discoveries about animal behaviour of the twentieth cen-
tury enabled or required new ways of narrating animal lives? Dominique
Lestel argues that ethology’s breakthroughs constitute a legitimate scien-
tific revolution with profound consequences for our understanding of
animals, including human beings.14 Its substantiation of heretofore unrec-
ognised capabilities—whether in terms of cognition and tool-use, cultural
transmission and variation, invention and creativity or subjectivity and
individuality—challenges inherited ideas of human exceptionalism and
14
Lestel, Origines animales. See further Chrulew, “Philosophical Ethology.”
24 M. CHRULEW
animal mechanism. Of particular importance is the recognition that ani-

mals have not only a phylogenetic (or species) history and a cultural (or
group) history but also their own coherent individual (biographical) his-
tory, diverging from their conspecifics due to differences of personality,
experience or otherwise.15 Importantly, these developments not only teach
us about commonality between humans and animals, but in many ways
themselves resulted from hybrid communities or at least new forms of
interspecies relationship. For example, the longitudinal field studies by
pioneering women such as Jane Goodall (with chimpanzees), Shirley
Strum (with baboons) and Joyce Poole (with elephants) involved forms of
shared life, mutual understanding, ethnographic description and bio-
graphical narration.16 More than as a science of nonhuman culture, it was
practising ethology as a social science and cultural activity itself that
enabled the comprehension of animal sociality and individuality.
A clear example of these dynamics is given by Vinciane Despret when
she tracks the emergence of an anthropological approach in Amotz
Zahavi’s field research on Arabian babblers, the subject of substantial con-
troversy among sociobiologists.17 Significant events in the lives of the
birds—births and deaths, pairings, arrivals and expulsions—were not only
taken as data, but enabled the babblers to become the heroes of surprising
narrative genres: warlike epics, soap operas, romantic adventures. Despret
traces Zahavi’s method of engaging with the birds in close proximity,
through daily following and provisioning, through individual recognition
and naming. The field site is thus structured as an anthropological space in
which the researcher can engage with his subject. Moreover, it is not the
deep time of evolutionary theory, nor the experimental laboratory time of
manipulation and variation, but rather historical time, lived time, in which
the birds participate in this research. Importantly, Despret emphasises that
this is not simply a secondary effect of the scientist’s method: “the narra-
tive and anecdotal form is the result at once of the anthropological
approach and of the creative and diversified behaviour of the birds,”18
which itself demands more qualitative techniques.
Various, often minoritarian practices and theories within ethology have
thus helped to open up a domain for better understanding animals as
individuals. Experimenting with techniques for disclosing their subjects’
15
Lestel, Origines animales, 376–377.
16
Lestel, L’animal singulier, 70.
17
Despret, Théorie éthologique. (Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.)
18
Ibid., 173.
interior lives, they both demand and make possible animal biographies.
Rather than the quantification of species behaviour through an ethogram,
it became clear that certain animals at least could be properly understood
only by recognising their individuality as subjects and persons.19 While the
Lorenzian approach identifies behavioural differences as abnormal devia-
tions from the species norm, the following, more anthropological genera-
tion of field studies tracks the particularities of each of their subjects.
Breaking with the orthodox assumptions of species homogeneity and
mechanistic stimulation that restrict animal diversity and plasticity and
refuse animal self-identity and cognitive responsiveness, these new
approaches recognise the coherence and meaningfulness of an animal’s
individual history:
One feature of long-term longitudinal studies is that they follow specific

individuals in detail and thus draw up genuine biographies. We have not
paid enough attention to the growing practice of characterizing an animal
through its biography, which supposes a temporal consistency in the idio-
syncratic behaviours and ‘mental states’ (preferences, dislikes, skill…) of a
given animal.20
The reciprocal familiarity that comes from extended observation allows

these distinctive lives and personalities to be meaningfully distinguished,
grasped and described.
Importantly, animal biography emerged in the description not only of
individual “wild” animals as autonomous subjects in field studies, but in
particular of “singular animals”—those who, as a result of intensive and
often passionate relationships in the company of humans, develop surpris-
ing capabilities not normally thought available to their species.21 Lestel
argues that in hybrid human-animal communities (such as the ape language
experiments of the sixties and seventies) animals become subjectified as
strong heteronomous subjects: “Animal biography (the story of the life of
an animal) was invented in the twentieth century, and some animals, like
Washoe the chimpanzee and Kanzi the bonobo, became truly renowned.
The ‘self’ of an animal that has a relationship with a human is different from
the self it would have had if it had never interacted with a human.”22 Lestel
19
Lestel, L’animal singulier, 36.
20
Lestel, “The Biosemiotics,” 50.
21
Lestel, L’animal singulier, 69–74.
22
Ibid., 74. Translated by Hollis Taylor, in Lestel, “Question,” 119.
26 M. CHRULEW
takes up this question again in his book on animal friendship, contrasting

“exterior” animal biographies (recounted by people speaking in place of
the animal) to those recounted by those who live with and know the animal
concerned.23 This dimension of shared life is significant: friendship with
animals, Lestel argues, stems from narrating their lives as our friends
through “collective biographies.” The emphasis is not on representation
but mutual production and transformation: hybrid community does not
just enable the description of animal lives but, through particular and per-
sonal (rather than general and abstract) relationships, through the media-
tion of processes of storytelling, interpretation and interaction, it actively
produces animal personhood with more complex and dynamic forms of
interiority and identity. Not only does ethology reveal that animals are bio-
graphical subjects; shared lives contagiously actualise latent potentialities
and catalyse novel modes of conduct among biographable animals.
These approaches and analyses open up the space of a more philosophi-
cal ethology—an ethology of the singular, rather than the general, as
Lestel puts it—that is both critical of mechanomorphism and aware of the
simultaneous necessity and dangers of the “mirror game” of anthropo-
morphism, filled with metaphors and analogies and cultural projections
(whether of gender norms or economic models) but not reducible to such
reflections, requiring a careful, situated hermeneutics of the significance
of animal behaviour.24 Crucially, the animals are also recognised as capable
of actively responding to the questions asked of them, as co-producing
their identity and inventing new relations and ways of life. No longer
cleaving to the great divide between nature and culture, but situated
within what Despret calls a “space of equilibrium,” a web of relations in
which both epistemological questions and cosmopolitical negotiations
between humans and animals are at stake, different sorts of stories about
animals become possible. In this ethopolitical domain of animal subjecti-
fication and interspecies composition and diplomacy, the most pressing
“animal question” legitimately becomes that of their contemporaneity
and identity: not just “can they speak?” or “can they suffer” but in fact
“who are they, these animals, today?”25
It is from within this space that Éric Baratay asserts the need to move on
from the vain and false traditional division of the human from the animal,
23
Lestel, Les amis, 154–157.
24
Buchanan et al., “General Introduction”; Lestel et al., “The Phenomenology.”
25
Chrulew, “Biopolitical Subjects.”
to consider animals as individuals and thus to write their lives.26 Baratay

distinguishes a number of different forms that animal biographies have
taken, from the fictional and anthropomorphic literary genre to the biog-
raphies of real celebrity animals at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is
after 1950, he writes, that under the influence of popularised ethology we
see biographies of ordinary animals: “We first preferred heroes and then
representatives of their species, and finally, atypical individualities, almost
unbearable by their character and behaviour.”27 Alongside social science
approaches that focused on relations of everyday life, play and work, on
animals as agents in history, both ethology and animal philosophy recog-
nised the richness of animal existence, the sharing of emotions, the varia-
tion within cultures and between diverse personalities, the capacity for
coherent internal self-relation and for change relevant to others and over
time: “The individual is also placed at the heart of encounters, interspecific
companionships, hybrid communities.”28 Yet while Baratay recognises
biographies of animals produced by some ethologists, from Lorenz and his
birds to Goodall and her chimps, these do not quite comprise, he argues,
an autonomous biographical genre, insofar as what is being shown through
the individual animal is the species and its relations.
Building on such developments, Baratay proposes and himself attempts
another approach, a form of animal biography in which one places oneself
“on the animal’s side” to relate its life: “to place oneself on the side of the
animal in order to account for what he experiences, feels at a given moment,
during a period or during his life.”29 While the idea of taking the animal’s
point of view has often been criticised as an impossible enterprise, Baratay
defends the significance of limited, uncertain insight into the worlds of
others. Alongside the Uexküllian approach mentioned, he points to the
existence of an alternative zoocentric tradition of painting, writing and
psychology since the second half of the nineteenth century in such figures
as Jack London, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf—a mode that has much
in common with the ethologists and field primatologists who successfully
inserted themselves among animals, and one that has recently returned,
26
Baratay, Biographies animales. His preamble on the conditions of possibility for such an
endeavour emphasises the developments in twentieth-century ethology and their interpreta-
tion in the philosophy of animality of Lestel, Despret, Haraway and others as enabling new
ways of narrating animal lives.
27
Ibid., 17.
28
Ibid., 20.
29
Ibid., 21–22, see also Baratay, Le point de vue.
28 M. CHRULEW
prizing the capacity to suggest the alterity and diversity of the animal point
of view despite the risks of humanisation and reduction. Animal worlds can
only be better understood and related to by overcoming ignorance and the
obstacles to shared feeling, by glimpsing how they perceive human beings
and taking this into account in our own perceptions.
New, interdisciplinary approaches to biography thus become possible:
“For these purposes, it is necessary to revise history, to change the Western
conception of animals, to eschew anthropocentrism, to control anthropo-
morphism, to broaden our concepts, to cross the natural and human
sciences.”30 Drawing on the vocabulary of ethology, “the notions of indi-
vidual, person and subject must be reconfigured”31 beyond restricted ideas
of nature as an exploitable object, instead incorporating the nonhuman.
Baratay broaches the technical and methodological difficulties of this task,
the restricted availability of documents and archives, emphasising the need
to multiply sources and access as many facets as possible. “These biogra-
phies,” he writes, “will inevitably be partial, covering only the aspects
glimpsed by the sources, and biased, resting only on the faculties granted
to animals […] for the moment.”32 The challenging question of how to
write animal biographies should be confronted as an opportunity and
experimented with as a new genre: “To pass over to the side of other living
beings, a way of writing must also be constructed, developed, gradually
improved and gotten used to.”33 Of course, such biographical excavation
is not possible for most animals, in the anonymity of their lives and deaths,
with no traces left behind. Yet some definitively archived cases remain; and
in other cases, those in between, the task remains to work out how to tell
their stories and disclose their lives.
To this end, Baratay presents a range of different biographies—based on
different materials and setting different aims—which he divides into four
sections: the restitution of existences; feeling experiences; seizing an animal
epoch; and thinking generations. The task of the restitution of existences is
“to retrieve animal lives, to restore their existence, to show their singularity.”34
Yet it is also possible to capture from historical documents (albeit weakly,
imperfectly) the feelings, sensations and images of lived experience—to
understand ways of feeling in a psychological as well as geographical sense.
30
Ibid., 24.
31
Ibid., 26.
32
Ibid., 30.
33
Ibid., 29.
34
Ibid., 31.
Even further, biographies can participate in understanding animal worlds.

Historical phenomena of travel, commerce, capture and the attendant
transformations of animal populations and environments make possible the
demarcation of different periods for certain animal groups, different situa-
tions and ways of life and different epochs that can be characterised through
biographical narrative (such as the humanised experience of chimpanzees in
Europe from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, or the judiciously
anthropomorphic biographies of the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries). To think generations, finally, means taking account of many dynamic
epochs, not just biological but social generations, varying communities sub-
jected to transformative historical dynamics, “characterized by changing
environments, conditions, and thus behaviours.”35
Baratay argues in conclusion that since animals are “no more ‘natural’
than humans,” no more part of the “terrestrial décor” (in that they too
adapt and evolve in relation to their environment, whether natural or artifi-
cial) there remains a significant task of attending to the ways animals adjust
to ecological and anthropogenic conditions, to their fluctuating sociabili-
ties: “A history of behaviours must be developed, of their construction,
transmission, transformation and differentiation, in order to build a history
of species, of their groups and their individuals.”36 If it can no longer be
denied that animal societies have histories, then the historian has much to
offer in partnership with the ethologist (and, one might insist, the philoso-
pher). Importantly, Baratay asserts the exploratory significance of animal
biography as a genre in this largely uncharted domain: “Biographies can be
used as a way of approaching and testing, and thus as a mode of operation
for questioning and experimenting, in order to make concrete the diversity
of possibilities, to test the effects of environmental and genetic changes on
behaviour.”37 This question achieves particular importance in the context of
the history of animal captivity and its intensification in the anthropocene.
Zoo Biographies
Menageries and zoological gardens have been prominent sources of such
histories and biographies. As colonial collecting and trade networks
shipped innumerable creatures into urban contexts, where amateurs and
35
Ibid., 175.
36
Ibid., 270.
37
Ibid., 270–271.
30 M. CHRULEW
professionals lived in unprecedented proximities to exotic animals, new

and often unexpected opportunities to disclose their lives arose. Of course,
through most of zoo history animals have been understood as specimens,
representatives of their species.38 But anecdotes of individual animals have
regularly been produced alongside the dominant descriptions. To the
most famous and familiar stories like Jumbo the elephant and Knut the
polar bear can be added the chimpanzee Consul of Manchester zoo, whose
life Baratay narrates anew, and the remarkable elephant who lived in the
Sun King’s Versailles menagerie.39 In their focus on the human dimensions
of these burdened institutions, historical and cultural studies of zoological
gardens have seldom paid sufficient attention to the individual and group
lives of their nonhuman inhabitants, or to the distinctive forms of encoun-
ter, knowledge and writing produced within them.
Indeed, alongside ethology, the science of zoo biology has contributed
to the development of knowledge about animal behaviour—particularly
about its modification in the anthropogenic environments of captivity—
and likewise given rise to new animal stories. In this segregated yet none-
theless permeable mode of living alongside animals, not only new forms of
knowledge and practices of care, but also emergent animal subjectivities
gave rise to new forms of animal biography. In particular, it was a process
of biopolitical modernisation and professionalisation across the twentieth
century that saw the keeping of captive animals become founded on scien-
tific knowledge of optimal methods for nutrition, hygiene, enclosure,
enrichment and propagation. As we saw in Hediger’s autobiographical
account of the tame monitor that he could not bring himself to preserve,
zoo biology is oriented towards living animals or, more precisely, towards
making animals live. And indeed Hediger was very influential in this
regard: across his books and articles as well as professional interventions,
he helped develop and articulate zoo biology as the science of human-
animal interaction and animal subjectification in captivity. His Uexküllian
38
See, for example, Velvin, Portraits, in which animals such as “the cheetah,” “the lion”
and “the bactrian camel” are evoked according to the distinctive characteristics of the
species.
39
Within his natural history, the French Academician Claude Perrault includes a set of
intriguing and somewhat out-of-place anecdotes about this elephant sourced from the ani-
mal’s keepers and repeated later in Loisel’s history of zoos. This distinctive animal biography,
based on living encounter, supplements and in some ways destabilises the extensive anatomi-
cal descriptions of elephants, based on autopsy, among which it is nestled “word for word.”
See Chrulew, “Biopolitical Thresholds,” 135–138.
approach always began zoocentrically from the phenomenological world

of the animal; by taking its point of view into account, by understanding
how it perceives the different elements and agents of its new environment,
the deleterious effects of captivity could be ameliorated. In order to prop-
erly care for any particular animal, its keepers must know not only its
species-specific requirements but also its biographical life history, its trau-
mas and attachments. Thus their familiarity, expert knowledge and every-
day contact enabled zoo men and women (directors, curators, veterinarians,
keepers and others) to become spokespersons for the ways of life and
modes of interaction of certain animals, as species but also as individuals,
articulating their preferences and needs, personality and interiority.
Zoo biography, the writing of captive animal lives, is thus intertwined with
and enabled by not just zoo biology, the knowledge of captive animal life, but
also zoo biopower—the techniques for the optimisation of animal life in cap-
tivity. And whatever may have been learned and refined of the production of
life, the power exercised over animals in this apparatus has long had damag-
ing effects. That is, the often pitiable relations constituted in the zoo—a site
that Lestel calls the “degree zero” of hybrid community40—have most often
produced bare or wounded lives, impoverished or pathologised or other-
wise harmed animal bodies and souls. The tales that emerge from this tangle
of domination and encounter, curiosity and custody, are those of capture
and resistance, taming and refusal, adaptation and malformation.
Perhaps more revealing, then, are not the lives of famous zoo animals
but rather the lives of infamous animals—not so much scandalous or noto-
rious but, nonetheless, unsettling and deviant, whose brief clashes with the
anthropocentric power of collection and management have left behind
enigmatic traces. Of course, the vast majority of captured animals died
during trapping or transit or endured poor, unremarked lives as subjects of
spectacle and perhaps research but not narrative. Yet this anonymous mul-
titude has also made its mark on the archive, pressed up against the weight
of textual history with its tremors and cries. In “The Life of Infamous
Men”—the introduction to a collection of records of notorious abnormals
in their encounters with judicial and psychological authorities—Foucault
captures the way such unprivileged, otherwise silenced people enter into
the archive through clashes with the mechanisms of authority: “All these
lives, which were destined to pass beneath all discourse and to disappear
40
Lestel, L’animalité, 109–110.
32 M. CHRULEW
without ever being spoken, have only been able to leave behind traces—
brief, incisive, and often enigmatic—at the point of their instantaneous
contact with power.”41 He thus models a historical method that eschews
famous stories and dominant narratives, instead trawling for records of
resistance, traces of violence and confrontation, moments of fury and
capture.
The institutional archive of zoo biology indeed includes countless resi-
dues of animal lives thrown up against captivity over decades and genera-
tions: untameable beasts, uncharismatic creatures, those not amenable to
captivity whether malnourished, panicked or morose. Numerous examples
could be given—like Hediger’s escapees or Meyer-Holzapfel’s abnor-
mals42—but I will take up Lee Crandall’s 1964 The Management of Wild
Mammals in Captivity, an essential record of the biopolitical modernisa-
tion of zoological gardens. As Crandall writes, “Within the present cen-
tury great strides have been made in the development of maintenance
methods that will satisfy the physical and psychological needs of the ani-
mals and at the same time allow them to be so shown that at least some
segments of natural habitats and life cycles are illustrated.”43 Crandall’s
book catalogues precisely this development of the science of zoo biology
and, at the same time, the uncountable animal lives spent on its achieve-
ment. An ornithologist and keeper at the New York Zoological Park in the
first half of the twentieth century, Crandall continued to work through his
retirement as Curator Emeritus, painstakingly compiling the data for this
volume. The encyclopaedic tome includes over seven hundred pages of
taxonomically organised information and advice resulting from innumer-
able encounters and experiments. Crandall drew on his own 50-year career
of practice and observation, as well as on the records of that institution,
supplementing this from correspondence with zoo keepers and directors
around the world, as well as from the published scientific literature.
With imposing regularity, readers are informed of the experience with
captive management of the multiplicity of the world’s mammals collected
for urban display. As well as general information on their description, dis-
tribution, status in the wild and even cultural symbolism, he relates their
natural habits, whether climbing or jumping, feeding or fasting behaviours,
periods of higher or lower activity, needs for seclusion or protection from
41
Foucault, “Infamous Men,” 79–80.
42
See, for example, the chapter on “Cage Breakers” in Hediger, Wild Animals, 61–70;
Meyer-Holzapfel, “Abnormal Behavior,” 476–503.
43
Crandall, Wild Mammals, vii.
bright light. He describes various difficulties particular to the way a species

reacts, physically and psychologically, to captivity: calm or nervous tem-
peraments, shy or eager responses to keepers’ attention, tameability and
tractability at various stages of ontogenetic development and any species-
specific handling techniques necessary due to inherent dangers such as
claws, quills, size or strength. He lists specialised dietary requirements and
different feeding regimens and nutritional substitutes tried with varying
levels of success. He describes architectural and logistical requirements
(temperature, ventilation, light, dimensions, flooring, sanitation, sleeping
or breakout areas) to ensure the security and welfare of the animal enclosed.
Longevity records indicate how long members of a species have survived in
captivity. Each species’ captive breeding record is also given: whether it has
in fact been brought to reproduce, what methods were used, what results
obtained and relevant data such as gestation periods and appropriate group
makeup—essential information for institutions increasingly reliant on
reproducing their own stock.
Overall, Crandall describes the particular techniques of management
necessary for each species: what worked, and what did not, as zoos went
about their business of trying to keep them alive, to make them live. Some
are readily adaptable to captivity; they acclimatise and breed well, are con-
tent to be observed, handled and exhibited. Others struggle for a range of
reasons—sensitivity, specialisation, vulnerability—and thus often die, or
live poorly, merely survive. His text is a record of wounded lives and pre-
mature deaths, of convulsions of resistance to the ordeals of captivity and
the penetration and intensification of biopower. He describes problems
encountered and solutions attempted, ignorance and learning, failures and
renewed attempts. Nascent zoo biological techniques meet their limits in
the refusals and intransigencies of their wards; the animals act out, break
free, take ill, die, until conditions are changed to suit them, however mini-
mally. And as these observations and experiences are noted, aggregated
and compiled, these disposable lives and deaths become captured again as
data, contributing to the development of knowledge, skill and expertise
for the future improvement of care. Through experimentation with bio-
political conditions, emerging from and developing new forms of human-
animal interaction and shared life, however damaged, whatever the cost of
lives and generations—the apparatus learns.44
44
On the ways such harms, and particularly deaths, due to captivity were operationalised
in zoo biological knowledge, see Chrulew, “Death at the Zoo.”
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
éléments; chacun ne peut-il pas la rattacher au passé par de
sévères déductions; et, pour l’homme, le passé ressemble
singulièrement à l’avenir: lui raconter ce qui fut, n’est-ce pas presque
toujours lui dire ce qui sera? Enfin, il est rare que la peinture des
lieux où la vie s’écoule ne rappelle à chacun ou ses vœux trahis ou
ses espérances en fleur. La comparaison entre un présent qui
trompe les vouloirs secrets et l’avenir qui peut les réaliser, est une
source inépuisable de mélancolie ou de satisfactions douces. Aussi,
est-il presque impossible de ne pas être pris d’une espèce
d’attendrissement à la peinture de la vie flamande, quand les
accessoires en sont bien rendus. Pourquoi? Peut-être est-ce, parmi
les différentes existences, celle qui finit le mieux les incertitudes de
l’homme. Elle ne va pas sans toutes fêtes, sans tous les liens de la
famille, sans une grasse aisance qui atteste la continuité du bien-
être, sans un repos qui ressemble à de la béatitude; mais elle
exprime surtout le calme et la monotonie d’un bonheur naïvement
sensuel où la jouissance étouffe le désir en le prévenant toujours.
Quelque prix que l’homme passionné puisse attacher aux tumultes
des sentiments, il ne voit jamais sans émotion les images de cette
nature sociale où les battements du cœur sont si bien réglés, que les
gens superficiels l’accusent de froideur. La foule préfère
généralement la force anormale qui déborde à la force égale qui
persiste. La foule n’a ni le temps ni la patience de constater
l’immense pouvoir caché sous une apparence uniforme. Aussi, pour
frapper cette foule emportée par le courant de la vie, la passion de
même que le grand artiste n’a-t-elle d’autre ressource que d’aller au
delà du but, comme ont fait Michel-Ange, Bianca Capello,
mademoiselle de La Vallière, Beethoven et Paganini. Les grands
calculateurs seuls pensent qu’il ne faut jamais dépasser le but, et
n’ont de respect que pour la virtualité empreinte dans un parfait
accomplissement qui met en toute œuvre ce calme profond dont le
charme saisit les hommes supérieurs. Or, la vie adoptée par ce
peuple essentiellement économe remplit bien les conditions de
félicité que rêvent les masses pour la vie citoyenne et bourgeoise.
La matérialité la plus exquise est empreinte dans toutes les
habitudes flamandes. Le comfort anglais offre des teintes sèches,
des tons durs; tandis qu’en Flandre le vieil intérieur des ménages
réjouit l’œil par des couleurs moelleuses, par une bonhomie vraie; il
implique le travail sans fatigue; la pipe y dénote une heureuse
application du far niente napolitain; puis, il accuse un sentiment
paisible de l’art, sa condition la plus nécessaire, la patience; et
l’élément qui en rend les créations durables, la conscience. Le
caractère flamand est dans ces deux mots, patience et conscience,
qui semblent exclure les riches nuances de la poésie et rendre les
mœurs de ce pays aussi plates que le sont ses larges plaines, aussi
froides que l’est son ciel brumeux; mais il n’en est rien. La civilisation
a déployé là son pouvoir en y modifiant tout, même les effets du
climat. Si l’on observe avec attention les produits des divers pays du
globe, on est tout d’abord surpris de voir les couleurs grises et
fauves spécialement affectées aux productions des zones
tempérées, tandis que les couleurs les plus éclatantes distinguent
celles des pays chauds. Les mœurs doivent nécessairement se
conformer à cette loi de la nature. Les Flandres, qui jadis étaient
essentiellement brunes et vouées à des teintes unies, ont trouvé les
moyens de jeter de l’éclat dans leur atmosphère fuligineuse par les
vicissitudes politiques qui les ont successivement soumises aux
Bourguignons, aux Espagnols, aux Français, et les ont fait
fraterniser avec les Allemands et les Hollandais. De l’Espagne, elles
ont gardé le luxe des écarlates, les satins brillants, les tapisseries à
effet vigoureux, les plumes, les mandolines, et les formes courtoises.
De Venise, elles ont eu, en retour de leurs toiles et de leurs
dentelles, cette verrerie fantastique où le vin reluit et semble
meilleur. De l’Autriche, elles ont conservé cette pesante diplomatie
qui, suivant un dicton populaire, fait trois pas dans un boisseau. Le
commerce avec les Indes y a versé les inventions grotesques de la
Chine, et les merveilles du Japon. Néanmoins, malgré leur patience
à tout amasser, à ne rien rendre, à tout supporter, les Flandres ne
pouvaient guère être considérées que comme le magasin général de
l’Europe, jusqu’au moment où la découverte du tabac souda par la
fumée les traits épars de leur physionomie nationale. Dès lors, en
dépit des morcellements de son territoire, le peuple flamand exista
de par la pipe et la bière. Après s’être assimilé, par la constante
économie de sa conduite, les richesses et les idées de ses maîtres
ou de ses voisins, ce pays, si nativement terne et dépourvu de
poésie, se composa une vie originale et des mœurs caractéristiques,
sans paraître entaché de servilité. L’Art y dépouilla toute idéalité
pour reproduire uniquement la Forme. Aussi ne demandez à cette
patrie de la poésie plastique, ni la verve de la comédie, ni l’action
dramatique, ni les jets hardis de l’épopée ou de l’ode, ni le génie
musical; mais elle est fertile en découvertes, en discussions
doctorales qui veulent et le temps et la lampe. Tout y est frappé au
coin de la jouissance temporelle. L’homme y voit exclusivement ce
qui est, sa pensée se courbe si scrupuleusement à servir les besoins
de la vie qu’en aucune œuvre elle ne s’est élancée au delà de ce
monde. La seule idée d’avenir conçue par ce peuple fut une sorte
d’économie en politique, sa force révolutionnaire vint du désir
domestique d’avoir les coudées franches à table et son aise
complète sous l’auvent de ses steeds. Le sentiment du bien-être et
l’esprit d’indépendance qu’inspire la fortune engendrèrent, là plus tôt
qu’ailleurs, ce besoin de liberté qui plus tard travailla l’Europe. Aussi
la constance de leurs idées et la ténacité que l’éducation donne aux
Flamands, en firent-elles autrefois des hommes redoutables dans la
défense de leurs droits. Chez ce peuple, rien donc ne se façonne à
demi, ni les maisons, ni les meubles, ni la digue, ni la culture, ni la
révolte. Aussi garde-t-il le monopole de ce qu’il entreprend. La
fabrication de la dentelle, œuvre de patiente agriculture et de plus
patiente industrie, celle de sa toile, sont héréditaires comme ses
fortunes patrimoniales. S’il fallait peindre la constance sous la forme
humaine la plus pure, peut-être serait-on dans le vrai, en prenant le
portrait d’un bon bourgmestre des Pays-Bas, capable, comme il s’en
est tant rencontré, de mourir bourgeoisement et sans éclat pour les
intérêts de sa Hanse. Mais les douces poésies de cette vie
patriarcale se retrouveront naturellement dans la peinture d’une des
dernières maisons qui, au temps où cette histoire commence, en
conservaient encore le caractère à Douai. De toutes les villes du
département du Nord, Douai est, hélas! celle qui se modernise le
plus, où le sentiment innovateur a fait les plus rapides conquêtes, où
l’amour du progrès social est le plus répandu. Là, les vieilles
constructions disparaissent de jour en jour, les antiques mœurs
s’effacent. Le ton, les modes, les façons de Paris y dominent; et de
l’ancienne vie flamande, les Douaisiens n’auront plus bientôt que la
cordialité des soins hospitaliers, la courtoisie espagnole, la richesse
et la propreté de la Hollande. Les hôtels en pierre blanche auront
remplacé les maisons de briques. Le cossu des formes bataves aura
cédé devant la changeante élégance des nouveautés françaises.
La maison où se sont passés les événements de cette histoire se
trouve à peu près au milieu de la rue de Paris, et porte à Douai,
depuis plus de deux cents ans, le nom de la Maison Claës. Les Van-
Claës furent jadis une des plus célèbres familles d’artisans auxquels
les Pays-Bas durent, dans plusieurs productions, une suprématie
commerciale qu’ils ont gardée. Pendant long-temps les Claës furent
dans la ville de Gand, de père en fils, les chefs de la puissante
confrérie des Tisserands. Lors de la révolte de cette grande cité
contre Charles-Quint qui voulait en supprimer les priviléges, le plus
riche des Claës fut si fortement compromis que, prévoyant une
catastrophe et forcé de partager le sort de ses compagnons, il
envoya secrètement, sous la protection de la France, sa femme, ses
enfants et ses richesses, avant que les troupes de l’empereur
n’eussent investi la ville. Les prévisions du Syndic des Tisserands
étaient justes. Il fut, ainsi que plusieurs autres bourgeois, excepté de
la capitulation et pendu comme rebelle, tandis qu’il était en réalité le
défenseur de l’indépendance gantoise. La mort de Claës et de ses
compagnons porta ses fruits. Plus tard ces supplices inutiles
coûtèrent au roi des Espagnes la plus grande partie de ses
possessions dans les Pays-Bas. De toutes les semences confiées à
la terre, le sang versé par les martyrs est celle qui donne la plus
prompte moisson. Quand Philippe II, qui punissait la révolte jusqu’à
la seconde génération, étendit sur Douai son sceptre de fer, les
Claës conservèrent leurs grands biens, en s’alliant à la très-noble
famille de Molina, dont la branche aînée, alors pauvre, devint assez
riche pour pouvoir racheter le comté de Nourho qu’elle ne possédait
que titulairement dans le royaume de Léon. Au commencement du
dix-neuvième siècle, après des vicissitudes dont le tableau n’offrirait
rien d’intéressant, la famille de Claës était représentée, dans la
branche établie à Douai, par la personne de monsieur Balthazar
Claës-Molina, comte de Nourho, qui tenait à s’appeler tout uniment
Balthazar Claës. De l’immense fortune amassée par ses ancêtres
qui faisaient mouvoir un millier de métiers, il restait à Balthazar
environ quinze mille livres de rentes en fonds de terre dans
l’arrondissement de Douai, et la maison de la rue de Paris dont le
mobilier valait d’ailleurs une fortune. Quant aux possessions du
royaume de Léon, elles avaient été l’objet d’un procès entre les
Molina de Flandre et la branche de cette famille restée en Espagne.
Les Molina de Léon gagnèrent les domaines et prirent le titre de
comtes de Nourho, quoique les Claës eussent seuls le droit de le
porter; mais la vanité de la bourgeoisie belge était supérieure à la
morgue castillane. Aussi, quand l’État Civil fut institué, Balthazar
Claës laissa-t-il de côté les haillons de sa noblesse espagnole pour
sa grande illustration gantoise. Le sentiment patriotique existe si
fortement chez les familles exilées, que jusque dans les derniers
jours du dix-huitième siècle, les Claës étaient demeurés fidèles à
leurs traditions, à leurs mœurs et à leurs usages. Ils ne s’alliaient
qu’aux familles de la plus pure bourgeoisie: il leur fallait un certain
nombre d’échevins ou de bourgmestres du côté de la fiancée, pour
l’admettre dans leur famille. Enfin ils allaient chercher leurs femmes
à Bruges ou à Gand, à Liége ou en Hollande afin de perpétuer les
coutumes de leur foyer domestique. Vers la fin du dernier siècle, leur
société, de plus en plus restreinte, se bornait à sept ou huit familles
de noblesse parlementaire dont les mœurs, dont la toge à grands
plis, dont la gravité magistrale mi-partie espagnole, s’harmoniaient à
leurs habitudes. Les habitants de la ville portaient une sorte de
respect religieux à cette famille, qui pour eux était comme un
préjugé. La constante honnêteté, la loyauté sans tache des Claës,
leur invariable décorum faisaient d’eux une superstition aussi
invétérée que celle de la fête de Gayant, et bien exprimée par ce
nom, la Maison Claës. L’esprit de la vieille Flandre respirait tout
entier dans cette habitation, qui offrait aux amateurs d’antiquités
bourgeoises le type des modestes maisons que se construisit la
riche bourgeoisie au Moyen-âge.
Le principal ornement de la façade était une porte à deux
ventaux en chêne garnis de clous disposés en quinconce, au centre
desquels les Claës avaient fait sculpter par orgueil deux navettes
accouplées. La baie de cette porte, édifiée en pierre de grès, se
terminait par un cintre pointu qui supportait une petite lanterne
surmontée d’une croix, et dans laquelle se voyait une statuette de
sainte Geneviève filant sa quenouille. Quoique le temps eût jeté sa
teinte sur les travaux délicats de cette porte et de la lanterne, le soin
extrême qu’en prenaient les gens du logis permettait aux passants
d’en saisir tous les détails. Aussi le chambranle, composé de
colonnettes assemblées, conservait-il une couleur gris-foncé et
brillait-il de manière à faire croire qu’il avait été verni. De chaque
côté de la porte, au rez-de-chaussée, se trouvaient deux croisées
semblables à toutes celles de la maison. Leur encadrement en
pierre blanche finissait sous l’appui par une coquille richement
ornée, en haut par deux arcades que séparait le montant de la croix
qui divisait le vitrage en quatre parties inégales, car la traverse
placée à la hauteur voulue pour figurer une croix, donnait aux deux
côtés inférieurs de la croisée une dimension presque double de celle
des parties supérieures arrondies par leurs cintres. La double arcade
avait pour enjolivement trois rangées de briques qui s’avançaient
l’une sur l’autre, et dont chaque brique était alternativement saillante
ou retirée d’un pouce environ, de manière à dessiner une grecque.
Les vitres, petites et en losange, étaient enchâssées dans des
branches en fer extrêmement minces et peintes en rouge. Les murs,
bâtis en briques rejointoyées avec un mortier blanc, étaient soutenus
de distance en distance et aux angles par des chaînes en pierre. Le
premier étage était percé de cinq croisées; le second n’en avait plus
que trois, et le grenier tirait son jour d’une grande ouverture ronde à
cinq compartiments, bordée en grès, et placée au milieu du fronton
triangulaire que décrivait le pignon, comme la rose dans le portail
d’une cathédrale. Au faîte s’élevait, en guise de girouette, une
quenouille chargée de lin. Les deux côtés du grand triangle que
formait le mur du pignon étaient découpés carrément par des
espèces de marches jusqu’au couronnement du premier étage, où, à
droite et à gauche de la maison, tombaient les eaux pluviales
rejetées par la gueule d’un animal fantastique. Au bas de la maison,
une assise en grès y simulait une marche. Enfin, dernier vestige des
anciennes coutumes, de chaque côté de la porte, entre les deux
fenêtres, se trouvait dans la rue une trappe en bois garnie de
grandes bandes de fer, par laquelle on pénétrait dans les caves.
Depuis sa construction, cette façade se nettoyait soigneusement
deux fois par an. Si quelque peu de mortier manquait dans un joint,
le trou se rebouchait aussitôt. Les croisées, les appuis, les pierres,
tout était épousseté mieux que ne sont époussetés à Paris les
marbres les plus précieux. Ce devant de maison n’offrait donc
aucune trace de dégradation. Malgré les teintes foncées causées
par la vétusté même de la brique, il était aussi bien conservé que
peuvent l’être un vieux tableau, un vieux livre chéris par un amateur
et qui seraient toujours neufs, s’ils ne subissaient, sous la cloche de
notre atmosphère, l’influence des gaz dont la malignité nous menace
nous-mêmes. Le ciel nuageux, la température humide de la Flandre
et les ombres produites par le peu de largeur de la rue ôtaient fort
souvent à cette construction le lustre qu’elle empruntait à sa
propreté recherchée qui, d’ailleurs, la rendait froide et triste à l’œil.
Un poète aurait aimé quelques herbes dans les jours de la lanterne
ou des mousses sur les découpures du grès, il aurait souhaité que
ces rangées de briques se fussent fendillées, que sous les arcades
des croisées, quelque hirondelle eût maçonné son nid dans les
triples cases rouges qui les ornaient. Aussi le fini, l’air propre de
cette façade à demi râpée par le frottement lui donnaient-ils un
aspect sèchement honnête et décemment estimable, qui, certes,
aurait fait déménager un romantique, s’il eût logé en face. Quand un
visiteur avait tiré le cordon de la sonnette en fer tressé qui pendait le
long du chambranle de la porte, et que la servante venue de
l’intérieur lui avait ouvert le battant au milieu duquel était une petite
grille, ce battant échappait aussitôt de la main, emporté par son
poids, et retombait en rendant sous les voûtes d’une spacieuse
galerie dallée et dans les profondeurs de la maison, un son grave et
lourd comme si la porte eût été de bronze. Cette galerie peinte en
marbre, toujours fraîche, et semée d’une couche de sable fin,
conduisait à une grande cour carrée intérieure, pavée en larges
carreaux vernissés et de couleur verdâtre. A gauche se trouvaient la
lingerie, les cuisines, la salle des gens; à droite le bûcher, le
magasin au charbon de terre et les communs du logis dont les
portes, les croisées, les murs étaient ornés de dessins entretenus
dans une exquise propreté. Le jour, tamisé entre quatre murailles
rouges rayées de filets blancs, y contractait des reflets et des teintes
roses qui prêtaient aux figures et aux moindres détails une grâce
mystérieuse et de fantastiques apparences.
Une seconde maison absolument semblable au bâtiment situé
sur le devant de la rue, et qui, dans la Flandre, porte le nom de
quartier de derrière, s’élevait au fond de cette cour et servait
uniquement à l’habitation de la famille. Au rez-de-chaussée, la
première pièce était un parloir éclairé par deux croisées du côté de
la cour, et par deux autres qui donnaient sur un jardin dont la largeur
égalait celle de la maison. Deux portes vitrées parallèles
conduisaient l’une au jardin, l’autre à la cour, et correspondaient à la
porte de la rue, de manière à ce que, dès l’entrée, un étranger
pouvait embrasser l’ensemble de cette demeure, et apercevoir
jusqu’aux feuillages qui tapissaient le fond du jardin. Le logis de
devant, destiné aux réceptions, et dont le second étage contenait les
appartements à donner aux étrangers, renfermait certes des objets
d’art et de grandes richesses accumulées; mais rien ne pouvait
égaler aux yeux des Claës, ni au jugement d’un connaisseur, les
trésors qui ornaient cette pièce, où, depuis deux siècles, s’était
écoulée la vie de la famille. Le Claës, mort pour la cause des libertés
gantoises, l’artisan de qui l’on prendrait une trop mince idée, si
l’historien omettait de dire qu’il possédait près de quarante mille
marcs d’argent, gagnés dans la fabrication des voiles nécessaires à
la toute-puissante marine vénitienne; ce Claës eut pour ami le
célèbre sculpteur en bois Van-Huysium de Bruges. Maintes fois,
l’artiste avait puisé dans la bourse de l’artisan. Quelque temps avant
la révolte des Gantois, Van-Huysium, devenu riche, avait
secrètement sculpté pour son ami une boiserie en ébène massif où
étaient représentées les principales scènes de la vie d’Artewelde, ce
brasseur, un moment roi des Flandres. Ce revêtement composé de
soixante panneaux, contenait environ quatorze cents personnages
principaux, et passait pour l’œuvre capitale de Van-Huysium. Le
capitaine chargé de garder les bourgeois que Charles-Quint avait
décidé de faire pendre le jour de son entrée dans sa ville natale,
proposa, dit-on, à Van-Claës de le laisser évader s’il lui donnait
l’œuvre de Van-Huysium; mais le tisserand l’avait envoyée en
France. Ce parloir, entièrement boisé avec ces panneaux que, par
respect pour les mânes du martyr, Van-Huysium vint lui-même
encadrer de bois peint en outremer mélangé de filets d’or, est donc
l’œuvre la plus complète de ce maître, dont aujourd’hui les moindres
morceaux sont payés presque au poids de l’or. Au-dessus de la
cheminée, Van-Claës, peint par Titien dans son costume de
président du tribunal des Parchons, semblait conduire encore cette
famille qui vénérait en lui son grand homme. La cheminée,
primitivement en pierre, à manteau très-élevé, avait été reconstruite
en marbre blanc dans le dernier siècle, et supportait un vieux cartel
et deux lambeaux à cinq branches contournées, de mauvais goût,
mais en argent massif. Les quatre fenêtres étaient décorées de
grands rideaux en damas rouge, à fleurs noires, doublés de soie
blanche, et le meuble de même étoffe avait été renouvelé sous Louis
XIV. Le parquet, évidemment moderne, était composé de grandes
plaques de bois blanc encadrées par des bandes de chêne. Le
plafond formé de plusieurs cartouches, au fond desquels était un
mascaron ciselé par Van-Huysium, avait été respecté et conservait
les teintes brunes du chêne de Hollande. Aux quatre coins de ce
parloir s’élevaient des colonnes tronquées, surmontées par des
flambeaux semblables à ceux de la cheminée, une table ronde en
occupait le milieu. Le long des murs, étaient symétriquement
rangées des tables à jouer. Sur deux consoles dorées, à dessus de
marbre blanc, se trouvaient à l’époque où commence cette histoire
deux globes de verre pleins d’eau dans lesquels nageaient sur un lit
de sable et de coquillages des poissons rouges, dorés ou argentés.
Cette pièce était à la fois brillante et sombre. Le plafond absorbait
nécessairement la clarté, sans en rien refléter. Si du côté du jardin le
jour abondait et venait papilloter dans les tailles de l’ébène, les
croisées de la cour donnant peu de lumière, faisaient à peine briller
les filets d’or imprimés sur les parois opposées. Ce parloir si
magnifique par un beau jour était donc, la plupart du temps, rempli
des teintes douces, des tons roux et mélancoliques que le soleil
épanche sur la cime des forêts en automne. Il est inutile de continuer
la description de la maison Claës dans les autres parties de laquelle
se passeront nécessairement plusieurs scènes de cette histoire; il
suffit, en ce moment, d’en connaître les principales dispositions.
En 1812, vers les derniers jours du mois d’août, un dimanche,
après vêpres, une femme était assise dans sa bergère devant une
des fenêtres du jardin. Les rayons du soleil tombaient alors
obliquement sur la maison, la prenaient en écharpe, traversaient le
parloir, expiraient en reflets bizarres sur les boiseries qui tapissaient
les murs du côté de la cour, et enveloppaient cette femme dans la
zone pourpre projetée par le rideau de damas drapé le long de la
fenêtre. Un peintre médiocre qui dans ce moment aurait copié cette
femme, eût certes produit une œuvre saillante avec une tête si
pleine de douleur et de mélancolie. La pose du corps et celle des
pieds jetés en avant accusaient l’abattement d’une personne qui
perd la conscience de son être physique dans la concentration de
ses forces absorbées par une pensée fixe; elle en suivait les
rayonnements dans l’avenir, comme souvent, au bord de la mer, on
regarde un rayon de soleil qui perce les nuées et trace à l’horizon
quelque bande lumineuse. Les mains de cette femme, rejetées par
les bras de la bergère, pendaient en dehors, et la tête, comme trop
lourde, reposait sur le dossier. Une robe de percale blanche très-
simple empêchait de bien juger les proportions, et le corsage était
dissimulé sous les plis d’une écharpe croisée sur la poitrine et
négligemment nouée. Quand même la lumière n’aurait pas mis en
relief son visage, qu’elle semblait se complaire à produire
préférablement au reste de sa personne, il eût été impossible de ne
pas s’en occuper alors exclusivement; son oppression, qui eût
frappé le plus insouciant des enfants, était une stupéfaction
persistante et froide, malgré quelques larmes brûlantes. Rien n’est
plus terrible à voir que cette douleur extrême dont le débordement
n’a lieu qu’à de rares intervalles, mais qui restait sur ce visage
comme une lave figée autour du volcan. On eût dit une mère
mourante obligée de laisser ses enfants dans un abîme de misères,
sans pouvoir leur léguer aucune protection humaine. La
physionomie de cette dame, âgée d’environ quarante ans, mais
alors beaucoup moins loin de la beauté qu’elle ne l’avait jamais été
dans sa jeunesse, n’offrait aucun des caractères de la femme
flamande. Une épaisse chevelure noire retombait en boucles sur les
épaules et le long des joues. Son front, très-bombé, étroit des
tempes, était jaunâtre, mais sous ce front scintillaient deux yeux
noirs qui jetaient des flammes. Sa figure, toute espagnole, brune de
ton, peu colorée, ravagée par la petite vérole, arrêtait le regard par la
perfection de sa forme ovale dont les contours conservaient, malgré
l’altération des lignes, un fini d’une majestueuse élégance et qui
reparaissait parfois tout entier si quelque effort de l’âme lui restituait
sa primitive pureté. Le trait qui donnait le plus de distinction à cette
figure mâle était un nez courbé comme le bec d’un aigle, et qui, trop
bombé vers le milieu, semblait intérieurement mal conformé; mais il
y résidait une finesse indescriptible, la cloison des narines en était si
mince que sa transparence permettait à la lumière de la rougir
fortement. Quoique les lèvres larges et très-plissées décelassent la
fierté qu’inspire une haute naissance, elles étaient empreintes d’une
bonté naturelle, et respiraient la politesse. On pouvait contester la
beauté de cette figure à la fois vigoureuse et féminine, mais elle
commandait l’attention. Petite, bossue et boiteuse, cette femme
resta d’autant plus long-temps fille qu’on s’obstinait à lui refuser de
l’esprit; néanmoins il se rencontra quelques hommes fortement
émus par l’ardeur passionnée qu’exprimait sa tête, par les indices
d’une inépuisable tendresse, et qui demeurèrent sous un charme
inconciliable avec tant de défauts. Elle tenait beaucoup de son aïeul
le duc de Casa-Réal, grand d’Espagne. En cet instant, le charme qui
jadis saisissait si despotiquement les âmes amoureuses de la
poésie, jaillissait de sa tête plus vigoureusement qu’en aucun
moment de sa vie passée, et s’exerçait, pour ainsi dire, dans le vide,
en exprimant une volonté fascinatrice toute-puissante sur les
hommes, mais sans force sur les destinées. Quand ses yeux
quittaient le bocal où elle regardait les poissons sans les voir, elle les
relevait par un mouvement désespéré, comme pour invoquer le ciel.
Ses souffrances semblaient être de celles qui ne peuvent se confier
qu’à Dieu. Le silence n’était troublé que par des grillons, par
quelques cigales qui criaient dans le petit jardin d’où s’échappait une
chaleur de four, et par le sourd retentissement de l’argenterie, des
assiettes et des chaises que remuait, dans la pièce contiguë au
parloir, un domestique occupé à servir le dîner. En ce moment, la
dame affligée prêta l’oreille et parut se recueillir, elle prit son
mouchoir, essuya ses larmes, essaya de sourire, et détruisit si bien
l’expression de douleur gravée dans tous ses traits, qu’on eût pu la
croire dans cet état d’indifférence où nous laisse une vie exempte
d’inquiétudes. Soit que l’habitude de vivre dans cette maison où la
confinaient ses infirmités lui eût permis d’y reconnaître quelques
effets naturels imperceptibles pour d’autres et que les personnes en
proie à des sentiments extrêmes recherchent vivement, soit que la
nature eût compensé tant de disgrâces physiques en lui donnant des
sensations plus délicates qu’à des êtres en apparence plus
avantageusement organisés, cette femme avait entendu le pas d’un
homme dans une galerie bâtie au-dessus des cuisines et des salles
destinées au service de la maison, et par laquelle le quartier de
devant communiquait avec le quartier de derrière. Le bruit des pas
devint de plus en plus distinct. Bientôt, sans avoir la puissance avec
laquelle une créature passionnée comme l’était cette femme sait
souvent abolir l’espace pour s’unir à son autre moi, un étranger
aurait facilement entendu le pas de cet homme dans l’escalier par
lequel on descendait de la galerie au parloir. Au retentissement de
ce pas, l’être le plus inattentif eût été assailli de pensées, car il était
impossible de l’écouter froidement. Une démarche précipitée ou
saccadée effraie. Quand un homme se lève et crie au feu, ses pieds
parlent aussi haut que sa voix. S’il en est ainsi, une démarche
contraire ne doit pas causer de moins puissantes émotions. La
lenteur grave, le pas traînant de cet homme eussent sans doute
impatienté des gens irréfléchis; mais un observateur ou des
personnes nerveuses auraient éprouvé un sentiment voisin de la
terreur au bruit mesuré de ces pieds d’où la vie semblait absente, et
qui faisaient craquer les planchers comme si deux poids en fer les
eussent frappés alternativement. Vous eussiez reconnu le pas
indécis et lourd d’un vieillard ou la majestueuse démarche d’un
penseur qui entraîne des mondes avec lui. Quand cet homme eut
descendu la dernière marche, en appuyant ses pieds sur les dalles
par un mouvement plein d’hésitation, il resta pendant un moment
dans le grand palier où aboutissait le couloir qui menait à la salle des
gens, et d’où l’on entrait également au parloir par une porte cachée
dans la boiserie, comme l’était parallèlement celle qui donnait dans
la salle à manger. En ce moment, un léger frissonnement,
comparable à la sensation que cause une étincelle électrique, agita
la femme assise dans la bergère; mais aussi le plus doux sourire
anima ses lèvres, et son visage ému par l’attente d’un plaisir
resplendit comme celui d’une belle madone italienne; elle trouva
soudain la force de refouler ses terreurs au fond de son âme; puis,
elle tourna la tête vers les panneaux de la porte qui allait s’ouvrir à
l’angle du parloir, et qui fut en effet poussée avec une telle
brusquerie que la pauvre créature parut en avoir reçu la commotion.
IMP. S RAÇON
BALTHAZAR CLAËS.
Il paraissait âgé de plus de
soixante ans, quoiqu’il en eût
environ cinquante.
(LA RECHERCHE DE L’ABSOLU.)
Balthazar Claës se montra tout à coup, fit quelques pas, ne

regarda pas cette femme, ou s’il la regarda, ne la vit pas, et resta
tout droit au milieu du parloir en appuyant sur sa main droite sa tête
légèrement inclinée. Une horrible souffrance à laquelle cette femme
ne pouvait s’habituer, quoiqu’elle revînt fréquemment chaque jour, lui
étreignit le cœur, dissipa son sourire, plissa son front brun entre les
sourcils vers cette ligne que creuse la fréquente expression des
sentiments extrêmes; ses yeux se remplirent de larmes, mais elle les
essuya soudain en regardant Balthazar. Il était impossible de ne pas
être profondément impressionné par ce chef de la famille Claës.
Jeune, il avait dû ressembler au sublime martyr qui menaça Charles-
Quint de recommencer Artewelde; mais en ce moment, il paraissait
âgé de plus de soixante ans, quoiqu’il en eût environ cinquante, et
sa vieillesse prématurée avait détruit cette noble ressemblance. Sa
haute taille se voûtait légèrement, soit que ses travaux l’obligeassent
à se courber, soit que l’épine dorsale se fût bombée sous le poids de
sa tête. Il avait une large poitrine, un buste carré; mais les parties
inférieures de son corps étaient grêles, quoique nerveuses; et ce
désaccord dans une organisation évidemment parfaite autrefois,
intriguait l’esprit qui cherchait à expliquer par quelque singularité
d’existence les raisons de cette forme fantastique. Son abondante
chevelure blonde, peu soignée, lui tombait sur ses épaules à la
manière allemande, mais dans un désordre qui s’harmoniait à la
bizarrerie générale de sa personne. Son large front offrait d’ailleurs
les protubérances dans lesquelles Gall a placé les mondes
poétiques. Ses yeux d’un bleu clair et riche avaient la vivacité
brusque que l’on a remarquée chez les grands chercheurs de
causes occultes. Son nez, sans doute parfait autrefois, s’était
allongé, et les narines semblaient s’ouvrir graduellement de plus en
plus, par une involontaire tension des muscles olfactifs. Les
pommettes velues saillaient beaucoup, ses joues déjà flétries en
paraissaient d’autant plus creuses; sa bouche pleine de grâce était
resserrée entre le nez et un menton court, brusquement relevé. La
forme de sa figure était cependant plus longue qu’ovale; aussi le
système scientifique qui attribue à chaque visage humain une
ressemblance avec la face d’un animal eût-il trouvé une preuve de
plus dans celui de Balthazar Claës, que l’on aurait pu comparer à
une tête de cheval. Sa peau se collait sur ses os, comme si quelque
feu secret l’eût incessamment desséchée; puis, par moments, quand
il regardait dans l’espace comme pour y trouver la réalisation de ses
espérances, on eût dit qu’il jetait par ses narines la flamme qui
dévorait son âme. Les sentiments profonds qui animent les grands
hommes respiraient dans ce pâle visage fortement sillonné de rides,
sur ce front plissé comme celui d’un vieux roi plein de soucis, mais
surtout dans ces yeux étincelants dont le feu semblait également
accru par la chasteté que donne la tyrannie des idées, et par le foyer
intérieur d’une vaste intelligence. Les yeux profondément enfoncés
dans leurs orbites paraissaient avoir été cernés uniquement par les
veilles et par les terribles réactions d’un espoir toujours déçu,
toujours renaissant. Le jaloux fanatisme qu’inspirent l’art ou la
science se trahissait encore chez cet homme par une singulière et
constante distraction dont témoignaient sa mise et son maintien, en
accord avec la magnifique monstruosité de sa physionomie. Ses
larges mains poilues étaient sales, ses longs ongles avaient à leurs
extrémités des lignes noires très-foncées. Ses souliers ou n’étaient
pas nettoyés ou manquaient de cordons. De toute sa maison, le
maître seul pouvait se donner l’étrange licence d’être si malpropre.
Son pantalon de drap noir plein de taches, son gilet déboutonné, sa
cravate mise de travers, et son habit verdâtre toujours décousu
complétaient un fantasque ensemble de petites et de grandes
choses qui, chez tout autre, eût décelé la misère qu’engendrent les
vices; mais qui, chez Balthazar Claës, était le négligé du génie. Trop
souvent le vice et le génie produisent des effets semblables,
auxquels se trompe le vulgaire. Le Génie n’est-il pas un constant
excès qui dévore le temps, l’argent, le corps, et qui mène à l’hôpital
plus rapidement encore que les passions mauvaises? Les hommes
paraissent même avoir plus de respect pour les vices que pour le
Génie, car ils refusent de lui faire crédit. Il semble que les bénéfices
des travaux secrets du savant soient tellement éloignés que l’État
social craigne de compter avec lui de son vivant, il préfère s’acquitter
en ne lui pardonnant pas sa misère ou ses malheurs. Malgré son
continuel oubli du présent, si Balthazar Claës quittait ses
mystérieuses contemplations, si quelque intention douce et sociable
ranimait ce visage penseur, si ses yeux fixes perdaient leur éclat
rigide pour peindre un sentiment, s’il regardait autour de lui en
revenant à la vie réelle et vulgaire, il était difficile de ne pas rendre
involontairement hommage à la beauté séduisante de ce visage, à
l’esprit gracieux qui s’y peignait. Aussi, chacun, en le voyant alors,
regrettait-il que cet homme n’appartînt plus au monde, en disant: «Il
a dû être bien beau dans sa jeunesse!» Erreur vulgaire! Jamais
Balthazar Claës n’avait été plus poétique qu’il ne l’était en ce
moment. Lavater aurait voulu certainement étudier cette tête pleine
de patience, de loyauté flamande, de moralité candide, où tout était
large et grand, où la passion semblait calme parce qu’elle était forte.
Les mœurs de cet homme devaient être pures, sa parole était
sacrée, son amitié semblait constante, son dévouement eût été
complet; mais le vouloir qui emploie ces qualités au profit de la
patrie, du monde ou de la famille, s’était porté fatalement ailleurs. Ce
citoyen, tenu de veiller au bonheur d’un ménage, de gérer une
fortune, de diriger ses enfants vers un bel avenir, vivait en dehors de
ses devoirs et de ses affections dans le commerce de quelque génie
familier. A un prêtre, il eût paru plein de la parole de Dieu, un artiste
l’eût salué comme un grand maître, un enthousiaste l’eût pris pour
un Voyant de l’Église Swedenborgienne. En ce moment le costume
détruit, sauvage, ruiné que portait cet homme contrastait
singulièrement avec les recherches gracieuses de la femme qui
l’admirait si douloureusement. Les personnes contrefaites qui ont de
l’esprit ou une belle âme apportent à leur toilette un goût exquis. Ou
elles se mettent simplement en comprenant que leur charme est tout
moral, ou elles savent faire oublier la disgrâce de leurs proportions
par une sorte d’élégance dans les détails qui divertit le regard et
occupe l’esprit. Non-seulement cette femme avait une âme
généreuse, mais encore elle aimait Balthazar Claës avec cet instinct
de la femme qui donne un avant-goût de l’intelligence des anges.
Élevée au milieu d’une des plus illustres familles de la Belgique, elle
y aurait pris du goût si elle n’en avait pas eu déjà; mais éclairée par
le désir de plaire constamment à l’homme qu’elle aimait, elle savait
se vêtir admirablement sans que son élégance fût disparate avec
ses deux vices de conformation. Son corsage ne péchait d’ailleurs
que par les épaules, l’une étant sensiblement plus grosse que
l’autre. Elle regarda par les croisées, dans la cour intérieure, puis
dans le jardin, comme pour voir si elle était seule avec Balthazar, et
lui dit d’une voix douce, en lui jetant un regard plein de cette
soumission qui distingue les Flamandes, car depuis long-temps
l’amour avait entre eux chassé la fierté de la grandesse espagnole:
—Balthazar, tu es donc bien occupé?... voici le trente-troisième
dimanche que ta n’es venu ni à la messe ni à vêpres.
Claës ne répondit pas; sa femme baissa la tête, joignit les mains
et attendit, elle savait que ce silence n’accusait ni mépris ni dédain,
mais de tyranniques préoccupations. Balthazar était un de ces êtres
qui conservent long-temps au fond du cœur leur délicatesse juvénile,
il se serait trouvé criminel d’exprimer la moindre pensée blessante à
une femme accablée par le sentiment de sa disgrâce physique. Lui
seul peut-être, parmi les hommes, savait qu’un mot, un regard
peuvent effacer des années de bonheur, et sont d’autant plus cruels
qu’ils contrastent plus fortement avec une douceur constante; car
notre nature nous porte à ressentir plus de douleur d’une dissonance
dans la félicité, que nous n’éprouvons de plaisir à rencontrer une
jouissance dans le malheur. Quelques instants après, Balthazar
parut se réveiller, regarda vivement autour de lui, et dit:—Vêpres?
Ha! les enfants sont à vêpres. Il fit quelques pas pour jeter les yeux
sur le jardin où s’élevaient de toutes parts de magnifiques tulipes;
mais il s’arrêta tout à coup comme s’il se fût heurté contre un mur, et
s’écria:—Pourquoi ne se combineraient-ils pas dans un temps
donné?
—Deviendrait-il donc fou? se dit la femme avec une profonde
terreur.
Pour donner plus d’intérêt à la scène que provoqua cette
situation, il est indispensable de jeter un coup d’œil sur la vie
antérieure de Balthazar Claës et de la petite-fille du duc de Casa-
Réal.
Vers l’an 1783, monsieur Balthazar Claës-Molina de Nourho,
alors âgé de vingt-deux ans, pouvait passer pour ce que nous
appelons en France un bel homme. Il vint achever son éducation à
Paris où il prit d’excellentes manières dans la société de madame
d’Egmont, du comte de Horn, du prince d’Aremberg, de
l’ambassadeur d’Espagne, d’Helvétius, des Français originaires de
Belgique, ou des personnes venues de ce pays, et que leur
naissance ou leur fortune faisaient compter parmi les grands
seigneurs qui, dans ce temps, donnaient le ton. Le jeune Claës y
trouva quelques parents et des amis qui le lancèrent dans le grand
monde au moment où ce grand monde allait tomber; mais comme la
plupart des jeunes gens, il fut plus séduit d’abord par la gloire et la
science que par la vanité. Il fréquenta donc beaucoup les savants et
particulièrement Lavoisier, qui se recommandait alors plus à
l’attention publique par l’immense fortune d’un fermier-général, que
par ses découvertes en chimie; tandis que plus tard, le grand
chimiste devait faire oublier le petit fermier-général. Balthazar se
passionna pour la science que cultivait Lavoisier et devint son plus
ardent disciple; mais il était jeune, beau comme le fut Helvétius, et
les femmes de Paris lui apprirent bientôt à distiller exclusivement
l’esprit et l’amour. Quoiqu’il eût embrassé l’étude avec ardeur, que
Lavoisier lui eût accordé quelques éloges, il abandonna son maître
pour écouter les maîtresses du goût auprès desquelles les jeunes
gens prenaient leurs dernières leçons de savoir-vivre et se
façonnaient aux usages de la haute société qui, dans l’Europe,
forme une même famille. Le songe enivrant du succès dura peu;
après avoir respiré l’air de Paris, Balthazar partit fatigué d’une vie
creuse qui ne convenait ni à son âme ardente ni à son cœur aimant.
La vie domestique, si douce, si calme, et dont il se souvenait au seul
nom de la Flandre, lui parut mieux convenir à son caractère et aux
ambitions de son cœur. Les dorures d’aucun salon parisien n’avaient
effacé les mélodies du parloir brun et du petit jardin où son enfance
s’était écoulée si heureuse. Il faut n’avoir ni foyer ni patrie pour
rester à Paris. Paris est la ville du cosmopolite ou des hommes qui
ont épousé le monde et qui l’étreignent incessamment avec le bras
de la Science, de l’Art ou du Pouvoir. L’enfant de la Flandre revint à
Douai comme le pigeon voyageur, il pleura de joie en y rentrant le
jour où se promenait Gayant. Gayant, ce superstitieux bonheur de
toute la ville, ce triomphe des souvenirs flamands, s’était introduit
lors de l’émigration de sa famille à Douai. La mort de son père et
celle de sa mère laissèrent la maison Claës déserte, et l’y
occupèrent pendant quelque temps. Sa première douleur passée, il
sentit le besoin de se marier pour compléter l’exigence heureuse
dont toutes les religions l’avaient ressaisi; il voulut suivre les
errements du foyer domestique en allant, comme ses ancêtres,
chercher une femme soit à Gand, soit à Bruges, soit à Anvers; mais
aucune des personnes qu’il y rencontra ne lui convint. Il avait sans
doute, sur le mariage, quelques idées particulières, car il fut dès sa
jeunesse accusé de ne pas marcher dans la voie commune. Un jour,
il entendit parler, chez l’un de ses parents, à Gand, d’une demoiselle
de Bruxelles qui devint l’objet de discussions assez vives. Les uns
trouvaient que la beauté de mademoiselle de Temninck s’effaçait par
ses imperfections; les autres la voyaient parfaite malgré ses défauts.
Le vieux cousin de Balthazar Claës dit à ses convives que, belle ou
non, elle avait une âme qui la lui ferait épouser, s’il était à marier; et
il raconta comment elle venait de renoncer à la succession de son
père et de sa mère afin de procurer à son jeune frère un mariage
digne de son nom, en préférant ainsi le bonheur de ce frère au sien
propre et lui sacrifiant toute sa vie. Il n’était pas à croire que
mademoiselle de Temninck se mariât vieille et sans fortune, quand,
jeune héritière, il ne se présentait aucun parti pour elle. Quelques
jours après, Balthazar Claës recherchait mademoiselle de Temninck,
alors âgée de vingt-cinq ans, et de laquelle il s’était vivement épris.
Joséphine de Temninck se crut l’objet d’un caprice, et refusa
d’écouter monsieur Claës; mais la passion est si communicative, et
pour une pauvre fille contrefaite et boiteuse, un amour inspiré à un
homme jeune et bien fait, comporte de si grandes séductions, qu’elle
consentit à se laisser courtiser.
Ne faudrait-il pas un livre entier pour bien peindre l’amour d’une
jeune fille humblement soumise à l’opinion qui la proclame laide,
tandis qu’elle sent en elle le charme irrésistible que produisent les
sentiments vrais? C’est de féroces jalousies à l’aspect de bonheur,
de cruelles velléités de vengeance contre la rivale qui vole un
regard, enfin des émotions, des terreurs inconnues à la plupart des
femmes, et qui alors perdraient à n’être qu’indiquées. Le doute, si
dramatique en amour, serait le secret de cette analyse,
essentiellement minutieuse, où certaines âmes retrouveraient la
poésie perdue, mais non pas oubliée de leurs premiers troubles: ces
exaltations sublimes au fond du cœur et que le visage ne trahit
jamais; cette crainte de n’être pas compris, et ces joies illimitées de
l’avoir été; ces hésitations de l’âme qui se replie sur elle-même et
ces projections magnétiques qui donnent aux yeux des nuances

Animal Biography Re Framing Animal Lives 1St Ed Edition Andre Krebber Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Animal Biography Re Framing Animal Lives 1St Ed Edition Andre Krebber Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Animal Biography Re Framing Animal Lives 1St Ed Edition Andre Krebber Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Animal Biography: Re-framing Animal

Lives 1st ed. Edition André Krebber

Animal Rights Education 1st ed. Edition Kai Horsthemke

Animal Locomotion (C Oabs T Oxford Animal Biology) 2nd

Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare 1st

Exotic Animal Formulary 5th Edition

Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World 1st

Animal Theologians Andrew Linzey

Small Animal Soft Tissue Surgery 2nd 2nd Edition Eric

Animal Diversity 8th Edition, (Ebook PDF)

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957697

The contributions in this volume were selected and adapted from a

1 Introduction: Biographies, Animals and Individuality 1

2 Living, Biting Monitors, a Morose Howler and Other

3 Finding a Man and his Horse in the Archive? 41

4 Recovering and Reconstructing Animal Selves in Literary

5 A Dog’s Life: The Challenges and Possibilities of Animal

6 “We Know Them All”: Does It Make Sense to Create a

7 Animal Life Stories; or, the Making of Animal Subjects

8 Taxidermy’s Literary Biographies 141

9 Caesar: The Rise and Dawn of a Humanimalistic Identity 161

10 Postscript, Posthuman: Werner Herzog’s “Crocodile” at

11 The Elephant’s I: Looking for Abu’l Abbas 207

12 Topsy: The Elephant We Must Never Forget 227

13 Online Animal (Auto-)Biographies: What Does It Mean

Matthew Chrulew is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Culture

Markus Krzoska is Lecturer in History at Justus-Liebig-University

Radhika Subramaniam is a curator, editor, and writer interested in

Fig. 5.1 An undated photograph of Hachikō likely lying on the ground

Introduction: Biographies, Animals

André Krebber and Mieke Roscher

A. Krebber (*) • M. Roscher

© The Author(s) 2018 1

a (post)modern sentimental interest, individual animal lives, both real and

(Animal) Biography: A Historical Synopsis

that the nature of biography is still to be regarded as undetermined. The

individual biographies may be largely untraceable.16 Methodologically,

rendering the animal’s mind, thoughts and way of experiencing into

biography recoiled exemplarily, if opening on the individual nevertheless

famously democratized the biography by claiming that “anyone who has

how “charismatic or confounding creatures shape the life of the animal

social meta-level, without, however, depriving the protagonists of their

primatological fieldwork as well as on the narrative structures of the texts,

reading of all sources available, moreover thickened by contemporary

Hamilton, Nigel. Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Living, Biting Monitors, a Morose Howler

© The Author(s) 2018 19

Entomologist Vincent G. Dethier writes evocatively of his fascinating

childhood realization: I like animals. Somewhere in the ontogeny of most

The contribution of Heini Hediger, the influential Swiss zoo biologist,

animal mechanism. Of particular importance is the recognition that ani-

One feature of long-term longitudinal studies is that they follow specific

The reciprocal familiarity that comes from extended observation allows

takes up this question again in his book on animal friendship, contrasting

to consider animals as individuals and thus to write their lives.26 Baratay

Even further, biographies can participate in understanding animal worlds.

professionals lived in unprecedented proximities to exotic animals, new

1 Introduction: Biographies, Animals and Individuality 1

2 Living, Biting Monitors, a Morose Howler and Other

3 Finding a Man and his Horse in the Archive? 41

4 Recovering and Reconstructing Animal Selves in Literary

5 A Dog’s Life: The Challenges and Possibilities of Animal

6 “We Know Them All”: Does It Make Sense to Create a

7 Animal Life Stories; or, the Making of Animal Subjects

8 Taxidermy’s Literary Biographies 141

9 Caesar: The Rise and Dawn of a Humanimalistic Identity 161

10 Postscript, Posthuman: Werner Herzog’s “Crocodile” at

11 The Elephant’s I: Looking for Abu’l Abbas 207

12 Topsy: The Elephant We Must Never Forget 227

13 Online Animal (Auto-)Biographies: What Does It Mean