Aesop’s fables, a corpus of animal tales from ancient Greece, take the form of morality tales in which non-humans embody all-too-human weaknesses such as vanity, sloth, credulity and selfishness. One of the translators of the fables, the Anglo-Dutch physician Bernard Mandeville, would later write an Aesopian morality tale of his own: The Fable of the Bees. The work – a long satirical poem about the hypocrisy of commercial society – shot him to literary fame when it was denounced as immoral by the Middlesex Grand Jury in 1723. Arguing that Mandeville’s work anticipates many of the themes of evolutionary psychology, this paper suggests that he was the founder of a literary genre that came into its own in the work of Charles Darwin and his followers. It goes on to examine some of the animal fables of science – from ants taking slaves, to rats pressing pleasure levers, to chimps looking in the mirror – using Mandeville’s literary achievement to ask why and how the stories of non-human natures come so indelibly to stand in for aspects of the human condition.

Johannes Weigelt (1890-1948), a German paleontologist and geologist, was the first proponent of taphonomy—the study of the decay, burial, and fossilization of biological organisms. In the mid-1920s, while performing fieldwork in the U.S. Gulf Coast, he came across scores of dead cows, birds, fish, alligators, and amphibians. Many of these creatures died as a result of extreme weather storms, their remains marooned and weathering in coastal beaches, river banks, and mudflats. Weigelt considered that the physical processes affecting these animals were analogous to those that preserved Miocene fossil specimens housed at the Martin-Luther-Universität in Halle-Wittenberg, where he was a geology professor. He photographed dozens of these decomposing animals during his travels throughout Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, setting these images alongside sketches of fossils recovered from central Germany in his 1927 book Recent Vertebrate Carcasses and their Paleobiological Implications. This ground-breaking monograph and its visual juxtaposition of post-mortem processes in contemporary and long extinct animals became a key reference for paleontology, as well as for archaeology, forensic science, and physical anthropology. This paper will present Weigelt’s photographic and field-based research in taphonomy on both sides of the Atlantic, focusing on how animal remains from the present and distant past served as concomitant sites for scientific and image-based knowledge production alike.

Pigs, chickens and cattle in factory farms need to eat. A lot. Millions of tons of feed are shipped across oceans to make industrial livestock production possible. This creates global problems, like deforestation in the global south, manure surpluses in the global north, and competition between animal feed and human food production. Until now, historians have neglected the history of livestock feed, especially in comparison to the human diet. The aim of this paper is to show the crucial importance of livestock feed as a scientific technology. Feed contributed just as much to the rise of industrial agriculture as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, mechanization and new breeds of plants and animals did. This paper focuses on one small country with a particularly intensive industrial livestock sector: the Netherlands; and on the period of significant intensification of this sector: the second half of the twentieth century. Lacking the land to produce the massive amounts of feed needed for these new ‘factory farms’, the Netherlands imported most of it – like soy and fish meal from Latin America. These commodities ended up in a new kind of feed: ‘compound feed’. Animal scientists were decisive for creating the best and cheapest compound feeds in order to maximize animal productivity – with major social-economic, environmental, welfare and health consequences for human and non-human animals across the globe.

In this paper, I examine how historical accounts of experimentation on nonhuman animals can be written in a way that does justice to tested animals as agentic and response-able living beings. In accordance with recent calls to decenter the human, nonhuman animals are given center stage, not because they affect human history, but because they are seen as subjects worthy of investigation in their own right. Several scholars have used the term choreography to write about interactions between humans and other animals. I propose multispecies choreography as a useful concept for writing about animal experimentation non-anthropocentrically. Thinking of these practices as multispecies choreographies, draws attention to all animals involved as embodied individuals, interacting within and across species as well as with their shared physical environment. Based on two empirical case studies about experiments on monkeys and mice, it is argued that these interaction often reproduce, but sometimes also challenge species boundaries. Analyzing how these multispecies choreographies change over time, necessitates examining micro-macro interactions to understand how the worlds of tested nonhuman animals are affected by developments in law, policy, et cetera. Finally, thinking of experimentation practices as choreographies can als show the workings of power, when considering not only movements included in the choreography, but also those movements that are excluded due to constraining species hierarchies within the lab and within wider society.

This paper considers how posthumanist perspectives are actively transforming the ways of thinking around animals in the arts. With the emergence of Performance Art during the 1960s, art history starts to explore living, non-human animals. Theatre and performance studies were already confronted with them in much earlier contexts, for example in stage fights in ancient Rome or operas in the baroque era. As theatre and performance studies deal with changing, dynamic artforms, they are corresponding with newer concepts, such as posthumanist performativity. Within the posthumanist thinking, the status of non-human entities like animals changes: Animals and their agency come into focus. They are not passive or matter shaped by humans anymore, but active and actionable entities within dynamic relations. Building up on the concept of ‚Posthumanism as a praxis‘ (Francesca Ferrando), Posthumanism serves as a interdisciplinary perspective and a tool to examine animals in the arts. It is an active decision to go beyond an anthropocentric perspective. I would to like ask what happens when we try to look at animals in art without assuming the human subject as our sole reference. This is examined by analyzing the installation Soma of Carsten Höller at Hamburger Bahnhof from 2010. In a fictional experimental setup the artist installs reindeers, birds, flies and mice so that the presence of animals transforms the setting into a performative artwork.