dc.description.abstract | This dissertation explores the ways humans used animals to shape Seattle in its
material and cultural forms, the struggles among humans about how best to incorporate
animals into urban life, and animals’ own active role in the city. The power of animals in
this history stems, in part, from their ability to provide three things that humans desire:
materials goods, love, and prestige. Humans have considered animals to be property,
companions, and symbols – creatures of economic, social, and cultural importance.
Human quests for these goods have consistently resulted in struggles over three
distinctions: those between human and animal, between domestic and wild, and between
pet and livestock. This dissertation explores the interplay of two alternative strategies
that humans adopt toward these three distinctions: treating them as strict dualisms versus
considering them to be borderlands, as distinctions that are fluid and permeable. Yet it
also asserts that animals have their own active role in history. It is not in isolation but in
relationship with animals and the rest of nonhuman nature that humans formed plans for
Seattle. Animal actions sometimes furthered and sometimes countered human projects.
In this sense, it was humans and animals together who shaped the city.
The dissertation begins with the encounter of Native people and newcomers in the
context of the fur trade on Puget Sound in the 1830s, describing the differing conceptions
of the human-animal distinction both groups held and the role domestic animals played in
newcomers’ land claims. It then considers the role of the spread of livestock and the
destruction of wild animals in the early history of Seattle, founded in 1851. It then takes
up the role that removing first cows and then horses took in making neighborhoods urban
and middle-class and the city modern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Finally, it describes the growing pet-livestock dichotomy, by considering both the
consolidation of the livestock industry away from cities in the twentieth century and the
growing importance of pets to city-dwellers in that same century. | en_US |