Agricultural History Review, Volume 61 Part 2 (2013), p. 361

This edited collection consists of three essays by the editor, in addition to his introduction, with further contributions from Paul Laxton, Sabine Barles, Takashi Ito, Andrea Gaynor and Philip Howell. It focuses on the use of animals – including livestock, fowl, and dogs – and animal histories within modern urban environs, and the conceptualization of animals, animal products and behaviours in the city as, variously, polluting, dangerous, nuisances or valuable commodities. The particular urban contexts in question include Paris, Edinburgh, London, and the Australian suburbs. Highly theorized, the book draws on the most recent debates within animals studies and makes the case that the city provides just as rich and complex a history of human-animal interaction as the countryside, if a neglected one.

The contributors are drawn from geography, environmental history, history of technology, and as noted in the preface, the emergent ‘animal turn’ has affected all of these fields along with sociology and anthropology. Atkins himself is very well known for his work on the shifting definitions and battles over the meaning of milk within food history. However, urban history as yet remains perhaps the least touched within the field of history as a whole, and this collection begins as the corrective to that. As Hilda Kean – who is cited in the collection, though along with other authors not indexed – argued in Animal rights (1998), functional animals such as cattle were readily visible in towns and cities, not just in the countryside. In the early nineteenth century, chickens, children’s author Mrs Lee observed in 1853, were ‘such every-day objects, extending even to London cellars, that they are not thought worthy of observation’. Witnessing cruelty to working animals such as horses, Kean has argued, allowed campaigners to argue for reform, and permitted prosecutions to take place within an emerging legislative framework that aimed to prevent such rough treatment. Observation in this respect, of both humans and animals, lead to new practices when it came to the handling of those animals that remained in the cities, which has been seen as part and parcel of the emergence of modernity. There is then a dominant narrative that suggests the animals were summarily removed and the city cleaned up for human consumption. Certainly, local statutes were often put in place in cities like Leeds to do away with pigs. Before this, as A. B. Reach writing for the Morning Chronicle in 1849, observed of Leeds:

I have plodded by the half hour through the streets in which the undisturbed mud lay in wreaths from wall to wall; and across open spaces, over-looked by houses all round in which the pigs, wandering from this central oasis, seemed to be roaming through what was only a large sty.

For Reach this was about cholera, but the ‘history of the flu’, Donna Harraway argues ‘is unimaginable without the concept of the co-evolution of humans, pigs, fowls and viruses’.

What is perhaps most striking, however, is that, by the end of the collection, the issues raised and the stories told pool together to make us begin to think about the larger issue of the traffic in animals, people, products and ideas between town and country – even about the micro-organisms that exist in the soil of both spaces – beyond the argument of the continuing significance of the (non-human) animal in the city itself. Atkins’s chapter on the ‘charmed circle’ of dung makes these continuities particularly clear, and it is worth remembering that human waste also formed part of this flow. All fertilizing substances were caught up in the wider thrust for ‘improvement’: when writing about the 200 milkmen of Birmingham, the larger of these setting great store in saving the dung from the 1000 head of cattle housed in the town, James Caird expressed great aggravation about the waste of human town sewage under the new sanitary systems emerging at this time. There was considerable traffic between town and country, not just in the fat of the land, but also in urban waste of all descriptions.