Animals

Volume VI, Number 2 | spring 2013

Purchase

Preamble

Man and Beast

By Lewis H. Lapham

Michel de Montaigne once considered, “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime for her more than she is to me?”

Essay

How to Be a Stuffed Animal

By Frances Stonor Saunders

The American Museum of Natural History, Teddy Roosevelt, and the importance of taxidermy.

Map

Working Relationships

Man and beast in collaboration.

View

Miscellany

Before their journey westward in America in 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were advised by Thomas Jefferson to “observe the animals” and especially “the remains and accounts of any which may be deemed rare or extinct.” One of the animal fossils that the expedition sent back is believed to have been of a dinosaur, dating from the Cretaceous Period.

Voices In Time

1784 | Passy

Dissenting Opinion

Benjamin Franklin praises the virtues of the turkey.More

Voices In Time

1896 | Bombay

Bird of Birds

Mark Twain honors the Indian Crow.More

Voices In Time

c. 1871 | Paris

From Zoo to Table

Parisians eat a zoo during the Franco-Prussian War.More

Charts & Graphs

Fit for Service

Animals, insects, and human corpses as war matériel.

View

Photograph of American writer and editor John Jeremiah Sullivan.

Photograph of East German writer Inge Müller.

Photograph of English art critic, novelist, and painter John Berger.

Painting of Benjamin Franklin reading a batch of papers next to a classical bust.

Contributors

Photograph of American novelist Willa Cather.

Photograph of British journalist and historian Frances Stonor Saunders.

Photograph of British humanist, naturalist, and critic Alfred Russel Wallace.

Image of Chinese Song Dynasty poet Mei Yaochen.

The elephant, although a gross beast, is yet the most decent and most sensible of any other upon earth. Although he never changes his female, and hath so tender a love for her whom he hath chosen, yet he never couples with her but at the end of every three years, and then only for the space of five days.

—St. Francis de Sales, 1609