Animals Count: How Population Size Matters in Animal–
Human Relations. Edited by Nancy Cushing and Jodi Frawley
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Citation Ritvo, Harriet. "Animals Count: How Population Size Matters in Animal–Human Relations. Edited by Nancy Cushing and Jodi Frawley." Environmental History 24, 3 (July 2019): 610-612 © 2019 The Author(s)
As Published http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emz015 Publisher Oxford University Press (OUP)
Version Author's final manuscript
Citable link https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122654
Terms of Use Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Detailed Terms http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
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Animals Count: How Population Size Matters in Animal-Human Relations. Edited by Nancy Cushing and Jodi Frawley. New York: Routledge, 2018. xii + 210 pp.
Illustrations, map, notes, and index. Cloth $140.00, e-book $54.95.
The down-to-earth subtitle of this collection tends to deflect attention from the paronomasic possibilities suggestively compressed within the title. Although none of the essays claims that other animals do the counting themselves, they all demonstrate that animals themselves matter, whether, from the human perspective, their numbers are too great or too small or, as Goldilocks would have it, just right. The rubrics under which the contributions are grouped emphasize the conjunction of evaluation with quantification. In order of decreasing plenitude, they are Excess, Abundance, Equilibrium, Scarcity, and Extinction. (The number of essays in each category diminishes in parallel with these descriptors, from four dealing with Excess to just one about Extinction.) The collection persuasively illustrates the significance of both senses incorporated in the title.
Animals Count developed from a conference held in Ballarat, and the varied contributions deal with animal-human relations in Australia. Some of them engage issues that affect large regions, while others focus on specific localities from Esperance in the southeast to the Great Barrier Reef in the northwest. The authors deal with many kinds of animals, from wild and domesticated mammals, to birds, fish, amphibians, and a range of invertebrates, as well as with human groups ranging from scientists and government officials to members of the public who wish to exploit or persecute or rescue them. As the editors of the volume point out in their introductory chapter, attention to the
Australian fauna is not new. On the contrary, its distinctiveness intrigued European visitors beginning (at least) with Captain Cook's observations in 1770, and continued to spark zoological debates through the nineteenth century. But (as is also the case with
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regard to animals in many other places) historians have tended not to mainstream them. In addition, among the enormous transformations that followed the colonization of Australia has been the introduction, intentional or otherwise, of many non-indigenous species, which means that the current Australian fauna is very different than the one that the crew of the Endeavour encountered, or than the one with which the original human inhabitants had coexisted for previous millenia.
Thus most of the cases of excess focus on introduced species. Libby Robin chronicles the national war--a kind of bizarre blood sport--against cane toads, which were originally introduced in a quixotic attempt to control cane beetles. Adam Gall describes the use of chlordane and dieldrin, both also toxic to humans, in the campaign against Argentine ants, which both threatened crops and infested domestic spaces, while Nicole Chalmer explains that the environmental understanding of Aboriginal shepherds partially mitigated the devastating consequences of overstocking sheep. Interestingly, the loaded terminology relating to "invasives" played a large role in the discussion of toads and ants, but not of sheep. It is similarly absent in Andrea Gaynor's account of attempts to combat intermittent locust outbreaks, since locusts are native to Australia, although the language of military engagement with the forces of nature figures prominently.
The frequent goal of such struggles for control is to wrest a profit from an environment whose abundance may turn out to be evanescent or inimical. Rohan Lloyd shows how early enthusiasm about Barrier Reef fisheries led to depletion, and Emily O'Gorman explains how the attempted conversion of swamps to pastoral land resulted in both direct (new zoonotic diseases) and indirect (compromised water supply) threats to human health. And abundance that does not directly inconvenience humans could
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nevertheless produce problems, as Gonzalo Villanueva argues in his discussion of the tension between the economic rewards of exporting live sheep and the humane criticism of the conditions that the sheep had to endure. Equilibrium turns out to be largely in the eye of the beholder. Nancy Cushing shows that feral pigs (who caused many kinds of trouble) helped settlers and harmed Aboriginal people by clearing scrublands. And that eye does not have to be human. The vines that Julie McIntyre discusses provided not just wine, but also food for many kinds of animals, native and introduced, while Ben Wilkie explains that in Australia as elsewhere, land sequestered for military purposes could also double as a nature reserve.
The examples of scarcity both concern fish, although the issues they raise are very different. David Harris examines the decline of native species, which had been
sustainably harvested by Aboriginal people for centuries, due to overexploitation by settlers and competition from introduced species, while Jodi Frawley explores diverse reactions to the disappearance of the redfin: celebrated by scientists and
environmentalists eager to restore the native fauna, but regretted by ordinary people who enjoyed catching and eating it. The extinction rubric functions as a kind of coda: it includes only Dolly Jorgenson's account of her pilgrimages to (mostly North American) memorials to vanished species.
While drawing its examples from Australia, Animals Count offers a survey of possible relations between humans and other animals that is generally applicable. Taken together, its contributions make an effective argument, both explicit and implicit, for the full integration of non-human animals into historical narratives within which they have conventionally been sidelined.
