The Horse and the Whale
Janet Davis on how animals tell the story of American development
Perhaps the words “sharkmania” and “capitalism” don’t immediately jump out you as sensible bedfellows. But in her book-in-progress, Sharkmania: A Transnational American History, professor of American studies Janet Davis argues that you can’t have one without the other.
In fact, not only does sharkmania jive with capitalism, she says, but so does cockfighting, whaling, the birth of the humane society, and the ways we view domesticated animals like cats and dogs. According to Davis, all these animal-human dynamics — and many more — help us to understand the history of the United States in terms of industrialization, war, international trade relations, the agriculture industry, and Americans’ relationship to nature. But how, exactly?
“We all live in the same world together, and animals are agents of history just as we are,” says Davis, who has made her academic career researching the ways in which animals convey our nation’s history. “Animals make historical change through their biological presence and impact, so one cannot fully understand human history without an understanding of the history of animal and human relationships.”
Take horses, for example. One only has to think of their film presence — the countless Western movies, the film adaptations of Black Beauty — to see they hold a major place in the American mythos. A “talking” horse even starred in a 1960s TV show, Mister Ed. But beyond pop culture, Davis says, we can look at the history of horses in America to understand the country’s industrial evolution.
“Animals literally powered the development of this country,” she says, explaining that horses in particular helped power the Civil War and many types of prior military campaigns. Throughout the first centuries of the U.S.’s history they were ubiquitous muscle power for transportation and hauling for farming and goods. But though their numbers were still robust in the early 20th century, horses were gradually replaced by machines in urban environments with the evolution of trolleys, railcars, and, of course, the automobile.
By World War I, horses were still used frequently in agriculture outside cities, but there was already an interesting in-betweenness happening with horses in cities that had begun in the middle- to later-nineteenth century, where they powered new transportation vehicles, literally called “horse cars,” that began to resemble the ones we know today. After the war, the horse market collapsed, and horses began to disappear from urban spaces entirely, although they still played an important role in American agriculture until the end of WWII.
“The urban horse ecology was replaced by one that was increasingly motorized — that kind of final mechanization of American agriculture,” Davis says. “Machines were now doing the jobs that animals formally did — threshing, turning wheels, making textiles — and that was a really profound, transformative moment.”
With this profound transformation also came emotional changes in the American psyche. “We moved from worlds where you were encountering animals all the time, to worlds that felt increasingly separate from animals, which caused a kind of increase in sentimentality about animals in the American public,” Davis explains.
With horses, sentimentality was perhaps geared toward nostalgia for a romanticized pastoral way of life in a rapidly mechanizing urban world. But horses were not the only animal fueling this emotional change. With industrialization, Americans’ relationship to marine animals also changed irrevocably, Davis says.
“From the 1700s until about 1840, America had a robust whaling empire centered in Nantucket. By 1750, whaling ships were basically factories at sea, which boiled blubber and spermaceti from the sperm whale into illuminants that were sold all over the world,” she says. The division of labor and processes developed by the whaling industry wound up serving as a kind of model for other kinds of assembly line factories, like the slaughterhouse, which really shaped how America worked and still works. After the 1840s, New Bedford, Massachusetts, replaced Nantucket because it had a deeper harbor for bigger whaling ships and immediate access to railroad lines to distant markets.
“Being able to create factories at sea and engage worldwide with energy markets really grew and spread capitalism as a result of this animal-based industry,” says Davis.
But because whales have long lifespans and birth few young, they were extremely vulnerable to rapid, irrecoverable population declines. Their numbers plummeted by the mid-1700s, and whalers began having to travel farther to find their prey, sometimes venturing all the way around South America to the waters of the Pacific on multiyear journeys.
One doesn’t have to follow the stories of horses and whales too closely to understand why the American consciousness of extinction grew with industrialization, or to get a sense of the emotional sentimentality about the specter of vanishing animals that came with it.
“As animals were treated as resources,” says Davis, “by the end of the 19th-century you had profound species loss, and not only in whaling. With declining populations and extinctions of birds like the passenger pigeon, which was market-hunted, and many others whose plumes were used in hat making, people started to mobilize to say ‘No, this market- and consumer-driven desire for these animal products will put them into extinction.’”
Policy changes soon followed. The Lacey Act in 1900 was one of the first pieces of legislation that banned interstate commerce in wild birds, and the Migratory Bird Treaty and Act was passed soon after. Conservation and preservation movements grew. Yellowstone National Park was established in 1872, Yosemite in 1890, and the National Park Service in 1916, along with national forests that had preservationist or wise-use ethics with an emphasis on management and selective use.
Pop culture wasn’t long in catching on. Disney produced Bambi in the early 1940s. Nature documentaries proliferated, and Mister Ed aired in 1961. All were predicated on ideas about animals related to wonder, beauty, awe, and loss. For some people, says Davis, “animals and nature became a form of salvation for humankind.”
So, as they say, it’s all connected. Without horses there would be no railroad; without whales there would be no oil trade. And without capitalism there would be no Mickey Mouse or Chiweenie standing on my pillow asking me for breakfast every morning.
For Davis — who has her students keep a journal of all the animal encounters they have in their day-to-day lives, and who has had classroom visits from chickens and even a boa constrictor — paying attention to the history of animals enables us to understand that people and animals are part of an interconnected web of life with historical consequences. In her work and teaching, she emphasizes that animals make historical change through their presence and impact on their environments and through their relationships with people in diverse environmental settings. She’s currently applying her immersive learning methods to sharks and their waters, which she variously links to the Age of Sail, American expansionism, WWII, beach culture, and leisure. Just as with horses and motorcars, it’s all connected.
“I look at my view of both people and animals as ecological, which allows us to think about each other relationally,” Davis says. “I look mainly at what people have observed and written, so there is a certain anthropocentrism because most of my archival sources are human-generated. But it’s also necessary to study animal taxonomies, physiology, behavior, and habitats to understand the historical impact of nonhuman animals. Consequently, the natural sciences are essential to my research methods as a historian.”
So, the next time you take the bus or subway, notice a raven on campus, eat something grown on a farm, or fuel up your car, remember that an animal brought that to you in a roundabout way — and that your existence impacts theirs, too.