Doran, Thomas John (Author)
Cook, Elizabeth (Advisor)
University of California, Santa Barbara
Cook, Elizabeth
Publication date: 2017
Language: English
Physical Details: 278 pp.
Vulgar Ethology models a way of reading natural history writing as both a scientific and imaginative literary genre, and it shows how compassion and science commingled in the minds of eighteenth and nineteenth-century naturalists before the nineteenth-century humane movement, even when their science relied on frequent animal killing. I argue that various models of animal protectionist rhetoric emerged alongside a developing study of animal behavior in this period. I show how naturalists took advantage of the flexibility of natural history writing as a multi-genre—which encompassed most of the popular forms of scientific and creative writing of the period—in order to represent their embodied zoological field research. In the study of animal behavior, imaginative genres allowed scientists to represent the humanistic aspects of their research not yet viewed as scientific. At the same time, as science writers, naturalists could expand definitions of what constituted imaginative literature. My research offers new perspectives on the relationships between literature and science, and it challenges the conception of animal protection as a center-periphery, anti-science political movement with origins in 1820s London, only eventually spreading to the Americas. It also complicates the ethics of this humane movement: In the nineteenth century, natural history evolved as it produced new knowledge about animal intelligence against the backdrop of increased animal exploitation, providing ethically compromised evidence for humane advocates. Chapter one, “Ethnoethology Invoked: Reconnecting with Animals in Indigenous North America,” shows how eighteenth-century naturalists consulted and sometimes misrepresented Native American folk zoology. I argue that naturalist collaboration with indigenous cultures informed new ideas about animal ethics and animal intelligence, and that the study of animal behavior itself emerged as a self-consciously American scientific practice during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century in consequence of the influence of Native American systems for understanding animal intelligence and culture. The next two chapters are case studies of innovative early-republic naturalists. “‘Our Fellow Mortals’: William Bartram’s Natural History of Animal Protection,” focuses on Bartram’s development as an advocate for animal protection and the rigorous scientific study of animal behavior, unpacking how his sensibility toward animals functioned across various genres. Through analysis of Bartram’s manuscripts, I demonstrate how he developed a humane persona for himself in his popular 1791 Travels. Chapter three, “Alexander Wilson’s ‘Transcript from Living Nature’: Biocentric Anthropomorphism and Animal Protectionist Poetics” turns to Bartram’s mentorship of Scottish-American poet-naturalist Alexander Wilson, who incorporated the study of animal behavior into his American Ornithology, using poetry as a rhetorical tool for translating new scientific methods and knowledge into embodied animal-protectionist narratives. Chapter four, “The Unnatural History of Animal Protection: John James Audubon and the Rise of Sporting Culture,” addresses the professionalization of the biological sciences in the nineteenth century and the consequent aestheticization of those aspects of natural history considered unscientific, especially sensibility toward animals. I track humane natural history writing into Audubon’s literary and visual portraiture and discuss how his methods interfaced with the nineteenth-century game-protection movement, reading game-protection laws as early, and often overlooked, forms of anticruelty legislation.
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