Even though it was met with good reception in the nineteenth-century, today, the forceful displacement of animals into different environments would come with greater disapproval. Some would consider this action morally unacceptable to move these animals into environments they were not adept. This, in my eyes, brought a great contrast to the possible future. If there ever were to come a time when machines become human like and can perform jobs much better and more efficiently than humans, would it be morally wrong to displace them to an unfamiliar environment in order to acclimatize them to perform a certain job, much like the camels. This draws great contrast to the camels because in their situation, they were able to transport soldiers across the vast deserts, a job that would have been much more difficult if it were not for them. Many would say this is morally unacceptable because the camels were placed there forcefully and it is not their natural environment. However this was done for the greater good of the U.S Army, which a utilitarian would argue is valid since it is benefiting the greater population. In the future, machines might become so human like that they are able to do a number of jobs better than humans would. If an android were able to perform certain jobs better than humans would it be morally unacceptable to place them in a different environment to perform a certain job or to complete a task, much as the camels did. Being that they are machines, I would guess some would argue that it is not unacceptable because they are not living biological beings (where in the camels case they are). However I would also assume that some would argue that it is unacceptable because they are human-like. This is a very real possibility that should be seriously considered for the not so distant future.

Obviously this wasn’t necessarily what was best for anyone but the humans (and at time not even best for the humans), as bird populations in the examples that Ms. Ritvo gave often either exploded in population (eating more than just the bugs and causing harm to the rest of the environment) or dying out because the new ecosystem could not sustain them. I agree with Ms. Ritvo that acclimatization was naïve experiment that was done in an effort to squash the unknown and adventure in a new place. Humans aren’t often looking for excitement it seems, just more room to do what they have always done, preferably in a way they are used to.

Humans need to exert their control over something or someone. The process of acclimatization allows them to do this with animals. Moving animals to a new environment and domesticating them indicate the human desire for control. It also shows that humans are not at the mercy of nature and the unknown; however, in the end, humans do not have complete control over the animal brought over. A species has the potential to over flourish or die out compared to the population size humans would like to retain. Humans do not have all the control over their environments, which is shown by acclimatization; therefore, Professor Ritvo is accurate in saying “the enterprise of acclimatization is much more likely to demonstrate the limitations of human control of nature than the reverse.”

As we push towards a more technological society, we can relate the story of species acclimatization to some of the potential problems associated with the advance of artificial intelligence. We can think of cyborgs as a new species introduced into our ecosystem of society. Following this train of thought, we must remember that while the usage of advanced technology may seem beneficial at first, it may prove to overpower humans. Just as we created the kudzu problem, cyborgs could become as much of a problem to humans as kudzu are to indigenous flora. It would be advisable to learn the lessons of the past in terms of species acclimatization so that we are better equipped to confront the problems of the future.

The extraordinary impact of this aesthetic motivation was brought home to me on a recent trip to the City of Christchurch, New Zealand, where I had never been before but where I was immediately struck by a feeling of uncanny familiarity. I can only describe the sensation as stepping through a time warp and being transported back to the London Borough of Ealing sometime during the late 1960s when I was still a teenager. Admittedly, some of this peculiar sense of déjà vu could be attributed to the smaller cars and predominantly low-rise buildings, but a bigger factor was the almost uniformly suburban English fauna and flora that surrounded me at every turn. The streets and parks were filled with familiar English trees and shrubs, and the trees and shrubs were filled with English songbirds—blackbirds, song thrushes, chaffinches—all singing familiar English songs. In effect, I was walking around a little chunk of England, seemingly uprooted and transported in one piece to the South Island of New Zealand. And what was particularly striking about the entire phenomenon was that none of this was a product of practical or economic necessity. None of those blackbirds and flowering currants were introduced as sources of food or to control pests. Their sole raison d’être was apparently to satisfy the colonists’ Proustian nostalgia for the comfortably familiar ecology of their homeland.

For somebody who devotes much of his time to studying the nature of people’s relationships with domestic pets, Ritvo’s account provides a forceful reminder that human attachments for the living world extend far beyond companion animals. The nineteenth-century acclimatization project reveals that the Victorians did their best to cling emotionally to their ecological roots even while they were carving out new lives for themselves in often profoundly exotic locations. In these alien contexts, the acclimatized European animals resemble the cultural equivalents of transitional objects—like the young child’s inseparable teddy bear or blanket—that provided the colonists with the confidence and the ‘secure base’ from which to explore new worlds. In the human-animal interaction literature it has now become commonplace to talk about the putative psychosocial benefits of our attachments for pets, such as dogs and cats. But few scholars have seriously addressed the possible psychosocial impact of our attachments for ecosystems or biomes. One can’t help wondering to what extent the staying power of the British Empire (or indeed any colonial endeavor) depended on the persistence and success of its acclimatizers.

Ritvo points to intriguing and changing notions of success in terms of introduction and acclimatization when she notes that some ‘targets of acclimatization shrivel and die’ – a failure perhaps for those who attempted the experiment – whereas others ‘reproduce with unanticipated enthusiasm’… which I imagine would have been treated as a success. The twist then comes when, later in the twentieth century, such successes become perceived as a blight and some people seek the eradication of these successful creatures. As Ritvo comments about camels in Australia, ‘After helping to build the nation, they had, it was asserted, “outstayed their welcome”’.

Indigenous and invader are always socially and culturally complex, and loaded, terms when applied to humans or non-human animals and when rights are being claimed by humans for themselves or when humans are claiming them for other animals. At the end of her essay Ritvo points to important areas for research when she suggests that the commitment to preserving native flora and fauna might be read in conjunction with early American human immigration policies — something that might be done with other cases. The language of imported/exotic species and their impacts on local natures often seems to find parallels with the language of the impacts of immigrant humans on local/national cultures and societies. How many generations from the settlement of early migrants, both human and non-human, does it take for them to be no longer invasive?

Ritvo’s work is historical but the issues she raises and engages with have contemporary relevance with new acclimatizations and introductions – but with a new term – ‘re-introduction’ to add to the mix. The term certainly needs careful interrogation. As with acclimatization programmes of the past these are projects in which humans initiate and guide the processes that are as much cultural as natural. Here animals are returned, re-introduced, to the spaces that some suggest they ought now to inhabit because they were there once. That ‘ought’ is not always shared. An example would be the furor, or the ‘wolf wars’ as one writer has termed them (sorry I do not have the reference to hand!) over the re-introduction of wolves into Yellowstone Park. Here was a space that had been cleared, in the early twentieth century, of what were perceived as pestilential predators and to which, at the end of the century, people planned to reintroduce them. The history of wolves here involved complex and multi-stranded issues and attitudes of hatred and removal; of revaluing, denaturalising and rewilding; and also of new hatreds. Again, this was an acclimatization process of animals from outside (from Canada) being transported into a new space in the hope that they would successfully colonize and multiply. They did – to the horror of some and the delight of others.

Similar issues can be seen in cases of species that are introduced and acclimatized to spaces old or new because humans would like them to be there.

If acclimatization is successful, its legacy includes a blurring of the boundaries between native and exotic and even between domestic and wild. Such ambiguity complicates our relationship with animals such as English sparrows or starlings: a century after their introduction to the US, can we really still think of them as exotic species? Like the nineteenth-century immigrants whose descendents have become fully American, these birds are part of the American landscape. No one seriously thinks that a pre-sparrow landscape could ever be restored. In fact, most people probably do not even realize that these birds are not native, and one could argue that even if sparrows are not caged, the ubiquity of bird feeders makes them something less than wild. It is a sobering thought that the robin – another introduced European species – is now the most common bird in North America.

Edmund Russell’s recent Evolutionary History reveals that the evolutionary malleability of organisms is not something that took place only in the distant geological past, nor does it work only in one direction. Examples of co-evolution such as canine domestication show that humans and dogs both changed in the process.(2) Introduced organisms may fill evolutionary niches left by the disappearance of earlier species, or they may create their own niches. Following French attempts to introduce the eucalyptus to Algeria, Americans planted it widely in California, where it adapted easily to its semi-arid landscapes. In some areas, eucalyptus groves have become favored habitat for migrating Monarch butterflies, and this has complicated efforts to restore native landscapes. Subjective and aesthetic criteria of desirable organisms as opposed to pests in this instance take precedence over ecological distinctions between native and non-native.

Australia, as Ritvo’s example of the camel shows, has been a particularly fertile landscape for non-native species. But the reversion of a domesticated animal such as the camel to a feral state has been duplicated in a number of sites. The novelist T.C. Boyle recently dramatized the impact of feral pigs on one of the Santa Barbara Channel Islands off the southern California coast.(3) Like the camels in Australia, the pigs were introduced in the nineteenth century and flourished in the absence of predators, wreaking havoc on a fragile landscape. The uproar that surrounded their recent removal from Santa Cruz Island in the interests of restoring its compromised landscape well illustrates the shifting emotional landscapes that surround introduced animals in particular. Like some Australian camels, the Santa Cruz Island pigs were removed with shotguns. Even if ecological restoration proceeds from clear scientific objectives, it is a human endeavor just as acclimatization was, and therefore equally subject to human values and objectives.

Anita Guerrini
Horning Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History
Oregon State University

Notes

(1) Michael A. Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); idem, “Acclimatizing the World,” Osiris, N.S. 15 (2001):135-51.

(2) Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

(3) T.C. Boyle, When the Killing’s Done (New York: Viking, 2011)

I would suggest that the idea that the Victorian Acclimatisation Society introduced animals in the colony solely because they saw that the landscape lacked ‘serviceable animals’ and were not discouraged when sparrows and rabbits ran wild is an artefact of the existing acclimatisation historiography drawing too heavily on the Society’s annual reports and focusing heavily on the Society’s importation program at the expense of their other aims.1

The Australian acclimatisation Societies saw that colonial landscapes were simultaneously brimming with agricultural potential and under considerable threat from ecological damage caused by colonisation.2 The ecological damage caused by the introduction of sparrows into Victoria split the Acclimatisation Society in two only three years after they were introduced into the colony.3

I would suggest that Professor Ritvo look to see if American acclimatisers’ attitudes towards sparrows was influenced by the disastrous impact of sparrows in Australia.

In summary I welcome Professor Ritvo’s insightful foray into acclimatisation in America but recommend profound caution regarding the published work about the Australian Acclimatisation Societies.

Pete Minard
PHD candidate
University of Melbourne

Notes

1.Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, The Rules and Objects of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, with the Report Adopted at the First General Meeting, and a List of Officers. Members and Subscribers to the Society (Melbourne: William Goodhugh 1861), 22. Linden Gillbank, “The Origins of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria: Practical Science in the Wake of the Gold Rush,” Historical Records of Australian Science 6, no. 3 (1982); Thomas R Dunlap, “Remaking the Land: The Acclimatisation Movement ” Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997); Michael A. Osborne, “Acclimatising the World: A History of a Paradigmatic Colonial Science,” Osiris 2nd Series Nature and Empire Science and the colonial landscape 15, no. 2 (2000).

2.Edward Wilson, “The Distribution of Animals,” The Times, October 30 1858. Edward Wilson, “Acclimatisation,” The Field, the Country Gentleman’s Newspaper, June 19 1862. “Acclimatisation as a Means of Restoring the Balance of Life – a Paper Delivered by Dr Madden.,” The Yeoman and Australian Acclimatiser 1864; Acclimatisation Society of Victoria – 1863-1867, Minute Books. Volume One, “21 March 1865”, VPRS 2223, P0000/000003, 610-12, Public Records Office of Victoria, Melbourne

3. Zoological and Acclimatisation Society of Victoria – 1863-1867, Minute Books. Volume Three, “March 31 1868”, VPRS 2223, P0000/000004, 837, Public Records Office of Victoria, Melbourne Zoological and Acclimatisation Society of Victoria – 1863-1867, Minute Books. Volume Three, “6 April 1869”, VPRS 2223, P0000/000004, 898, Public Records Office of Victoria, Melbourne

Harriet Ritvo is careful not to attribute unwarranted human characteristics to the camels and birds that populate her essay (although the same cannot be said for her sources), and to attend to the differences among species and locations that shape the varied ways in which similar acclimatizing endeavors unfolded. At the same time, due recognition is accorded to constraint and contingency. In the cases she discusses, these animal actors were largely, if not exclusively, initially transposed within and according to the confines of human actions and projects, only to escape these confines and evade, more or less, human control. What emerges is a picture of modified agency, something that looks like the expression of will (or maybe instinct) according to the contingencies of context—political, environmental, social, technological and cultural. As Ritvo suggests in her opening paragraph, the same could be said for most, if not all, human migrations. If we recognize the ways in which human agency is constrained by many of these factors, and acknowledge that free will is practically unlikely, then human actions and animal agency begin to look more alike, just as the rhetoric surrounding animal acclimatization parallels that of human migration. It thus becomes easier, perhaps, to treat agencies of all kinds on similar, if unequal, footing.

Rebecca Woods
Doctoral Candidate, History, Anthropology, and STS (HASTS)
MIT

First, I think Professor Ritvo’s essay offers us a way to think of acclimatization as a dialectical process rather than one that can only occur “in the human wake.” The needs of the very human U.S. Army to patrol wide tracts of desert in the southwest brought camels to the region. The camels, for their part, brought Hajj ‘Ali and other camel handlers to the U.S. Thus, depending on where we enter the chain of movement this story offers, either the camels or the humans are the motors moving the other species. Without going down the slippery slope of attempting to assign intentionality (camel or human) to these processes, the fact remains that camels brought their handlers to the U.S.—not the other way around. And as Professor Ritvo suggests in her last sentence and in other of her work, this dual immigration meant that both human and nonhuman animals became objects of acclimatization projects.

Second, as Professor Ritvo makes clear, acclimatization has long come alongside domestication. Taking the longer view, it would not take us long to think of many instances—domestication and as well as other phenomena—in which humans followed animals, not the other way around—Pacific fishermen following salmon or Central Asian pastoralists moving with their flocks. Are these instances of the animal acclimatization of humans?

More specific to the example of Syrian camels in the U.S., is it possible for us to make a case for the animals’ roles in the human demographic changes that took place in the western U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century? As American Indian communities continued to be ravaged throughout this period, massive numbers of Arab immigrants and others settled in the western territories of the republic away from more traditional centers of American power. Some of them, as Professor Ritvo shows us, were brought by camels. Thus, without overstating our case, could we understand immigration in the nineteenth-century American West as partly a process of the camel acclimatization of humans?

Thinking about this immigration leads me to wonder as well about how so many of the other commonplace stories we tell about the nineteenth century—capitalism, globalization, imperialism, nationalism, and state-building to name but a few—might look different were we to tell them as stories of acclimatization. Sticking with Professor Ritvo’s camels, one such story might show how acclimatization was a technology that emerged to deal with a growing number of expendable and no-longer-relevant animals in different parts of the world. Indeed, animals like camels, donkeys, water buffaloes, and mules were increasingly becoming less and less valuable as animals of labor in the Middle East in the nineteenth century. These creatures had long been the engines, trucks, and heaters of this rural world, and a decrease in their importance as economic actors was one of the most profound changes to the rural landscape of places like Syria, Anatolia, and Egypt to take place for centuries, or perhaps even millennia. Skipping over the details of a massively complex story, we can say simply that from about 1750 to 1850 animals were first replaced by humans as the preferred beasts of burdens in rural parts of the then still-Ottoman Middle East. A few decades later steam and rail would emerge to make it even harder for animals to make claims of economic worth in human communities. Thus a new animal economy emerged in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Domestic animal populations declined, a centralizing meat production industry began to take shape, and various animal institutions, many of which Professor Ritvo has illuminated for us, took over animal bodies—the zoological park, schools of veterinary medicine, and a silk industry. In this recoding of animals’ economic worth in the Middle East, it is therefore not surprising that Syrian camels left the region altogether to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Their historic laboring and economic roles were greatly diminished in the Middle East, so they, like their human counterparts, had to search for work elsewhere. Restoring camels’ roles as viable economic actors, therefore, became one of the chief tasks of their acclimatization in the U.S.

Thus, as a translation of animals into new environments, acclimatization was a science that made possible—and that was, of course, itself made possible by—the global movement of human and nonhuman animals, the spread of market economies, and ecological and economic change around the world. We might therefore usefully think of acclimatization as a search for utility—as a means of matching supply and demand. The U.S. needed camels and then it didn’t. Australia was good for camels for a period, but then there too they lost their utility and became expendable. Thus, as Professor Ritvo’s essay shows, examining acclimatization as a process of movement, adaptation, and translation across ecologies allows for doing animal history on a global scale.

Alan Mikhail
Department of History
Yale University