Abstracts

At the turn of the 21st century, repositories of natural history specimens reestablished the significance of their collections by designating them the new role of saving biodiversity in a decaying world. Ironically, the collections of these research centers have been intricately tied to histories of violence and ecological destruction. Developing imperial histories of natural history collections further, this twofold session brings together stories of extraction, preservation, and (scientific) knowledge production that attend to practices of killing, hunting, displacement, experimentation, looting, confinement, and care. The papers focus on different locations and species to analyze both the creation of knowledge in natural history and the preservation of animal specimens through the lens of violence. What can we learn about the multiple forms of violence through natural history specimens?

Part I: Taking focuses on the reconstruction of the political and logistical conditions that made the 'taking' of animal objects possible and which in turn were shaped by natural history practices. To what extent these histories of death and losses change our view of collections and museums? Starting with a microhistory of practices of killing animals in early 19th century South-Africa, Marie Muschalek analyzes interspecies-relations in a context of colonial violence against humans and nature. Tamar Novick focuses on the story of two ostriches, captured and used to define the "Syrian ostrich" as a subspecies in 1919. She outlines a history of scientific research deeply entangled in European military interventions in the Middle East. The question of how natural history exploited war sites in the First and Second World War is at the center of Ina Heumann 's paper. Shira Shmuely examines the history of an orangutan dynasty to highlight the consequences of wildlife extraction and the loss of cultural knowledge among animals.

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/ Marie Muschalek, University of Basel: Hunting Animal Specimens. Everyday Violent Practices of Knowing Nature in Southern Africa in the Early 19th Century

This paper proposes to pay close attention to the hunting practices of a number of lesser-known German naturalists who went into the field in Southern Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Working with the records of German collectors like Karl Bergius, Ludwig Krebs, Louis Maire, or Johannes Mund produced during their travels through the Cape Colony, I suggest a close reading of these sources to explore the daily deeds and experiences of all historical actors - local and intruder, human and nonhuman alike - involved in these collecting enterprises. The goal is to understand how the practice of killing animals to keep and study them evolved in the terrain as an interspecies affair, and how it was interwoven with violence committed against human life, that is, within the broader historical context of colonial violence and its politics of difference. The paper suggests to remain within the quotidian of microhistories. It scrutinizes material technologies and bodily techniques, rooted in Southern African and European traditions of hunting that informed practices of knowing and appropriating the natural world. It seeks to sketch out quotidian life experiences of hunting parties in which transimperial, interracial, interspecies working relationships, at times companionships, but also antagonisms evolved. And it pays particular attention to daily routines, manual skills, and savoir-faire in the predatory interaction with other living creatures.

/ Tamar Novick, TU Munich| Ella Tsahar, Oranim: Evasive Species: The Convoluted Battle for the Syrian Ostrich

After a decade of trying, the British collector and zoologist Walter Rothschild finally managed to obtain two specimens of the Syrian ostrich in 1919, a male and a female. They were captured separately in the so-called "Syrian desert," lived and died together in captivity in Palestine, and finally transported by a British military plane to his Tring collection, where the male is still kept and from which the female disappeared. With his new purchase, Rothchild was and introduced a new subspecies, Struthio camelus syriacus, to his scientific community in London and around the world. The Syrian ostrich was an animal inhabiting Middle Eastern deserts, including areas that were considered unreachable to Europeans, with fauna and flora nearly unknown to science, and it was highly desirable for these very reasons. The efforts to catch, maintain, and classify it were deeply entangled with the drastically changing political circumstances of the Middle-East in the early 20th century. As this paper demonstrates, scientific work was not only entangled with growing European intervention in the Middle East, but its success relied on existing and expanding, mainly British, military and diplomatic networks in the region. These were entwined with the dramatic militarization of the region, which resulted in the ultimate extinction of the bird. Its extinction then contributed to stabilizing the animal as a subspecies long after the trinomial age.

/ Ina Heumann, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin: Looting. A political epistemology of collecting in natural history

European and non-European wars are reflected in natural history collections in many ways. Parts of the collections themselves originate from theatres of war and can be traced back to military actors: mammals from colonial 'punitive expeditions', insects from the trenches of the First World War, birds shot by members of the Waffen-SS in Auschwitz, and destroyed collections bear eloquent witness to this.

Building on studies of ethnological, botanical, and ethnographic collecting that increasingly address the entanglements of collections, wars, and museums, I turn to the theatres of war in natural history to locate nature and natural history institutions as central sites of military violence and geopolitical interests. My paper examines the looting of an insect collection in Holland occupied by German troops, focusing on the justification strategies and consequences for the museum. Central to my analysis is the question of how far the exploitation of theatres of war for the hunting, looting and intellectual appropriation of animals can be described as a common practice of natural history collecting.

/ Shira Shmuely, MPIWG Berlin: Reassembling a Broken Family Tree: Parental Cultures in Orangutans' Display

Contemporary certified zoos often declare that wildlife extraction is no longer part of their trade. Yet the history of one orangutan dynasty reveals how animal cultural knowledge continues to erode as a lingering consequence of extraction-suggesting that "taking" represents a repetitive action rather than a past act. Studbook data, medical records, oral histories, and archival materials help reconstruct a familial biography illuminating the evolution of primate care practices. This paper shows how, from the forcible removal of forebears in Sumatra during the 1960s to the euthanasia of the youngest offspring in Zurich in 2023, keepers continuously deliberated over orangutans' existing knowledge about nursing their babies and grappled with what parental knowledge vanished in the transition to captivity. The issue of parental care reveals how zookeepers and institutional veterinarians speculated about orangutans' loss of maternal know-how. The question of parenthood-as emotion, instinct, and practice-marks moments of tension and convergence between the experiences and knowledge constituting care by both human keepers and captive orangutans. Some interventions in orangutan child-rearing manifested as institutional violence and disregard for mothers' learned knowledge, while other cases demonstrated profound zookeeper devotion and empathy.

/ Dorit Brixius, TU Dresden: Court and veterinary surgeon? Horses, animal diseases and medicine in 17th century Paris

In recent years, the history of early modern medical knowledge has focused on medical practice, relying increasingly on archival casebooks, notes, forms of therapy and prescriptions. This lecture shifts the focus of early modern prescription manuscript books and human healthcare to that of animals. Even though veterinary medicine only developed as a discipline in the 19th century, sick or injured (farm) animals have always been cured, but we still know very little about it.
This lecture focuses on the diseases and forms of therapy of horses in Paris during the Grand Siècle, based on the extensive archival legacy of the court physician Noël Vallant (1632-1685), who was active in Paris in the second half of the 17th century. Vallant was not only responsible for his human patients, but his archives also provide a multitude of insights into the healing of animals, especially horses. Vallant's archives are supplemented by printed treatises on horse care, including diseases and healing methods in early modern France. Particular attention is paid here to the associated materia medica. The article reconsiders the tasks of an early modern court physician by expanding them to include early veterinary medicine.

/ Melanie Foik, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw: Drunken dogs - The human medical view of animals and alcohol in the 19th century

In the course of the 19th century, there was a shift in responsibility for the subject of alcoholism from moral preachers to medicine. This shift in responsibility resulted in a large number of publications dealing with the consequences of excessive alcohol consumption as well as alcoholism as a disease in its own right.
Interestingly, hardly any of these writings on human medicine were without a digression into the animal world: Thus, especially in the first half of the century, animals served as a projection screen for thinking about why humans knowingly poisoned themselves with alcohol, while animals instinctively knew to avoid the substance. Thomas Trotter, one of the early representatives of the field of research focused on here, even claimed that humans not only degrade themselves into animals through drunkenness, but also fall out of favor with their otherwise loyal pets in this state.
From around 1850, such rather philosophical considerations were finally joined by experiments on animals. Dogs and rabbits in particular, but occasionally also frogs, were now used to investigate the effects of alcohol, for example with regard to blood composition, brain structure, body temperature or digestive activity. Both strands - the attempt to "improve" people with an affinity for alcohol through the moral elevation of the supposedly abstinent animals as well as the animal experiments and their questionable transferability of results to humans - were criticized and questioned by contemporaries.

The article analyzes thematically relevant writings by Western and Eastern European physicians. By examining the human medical view of animals and alcohol, I take up an aspect of the medicalization of the alcohol question, which I am investigating as part of the project "Alcohol, Sobriety and Drunkenness: Discourses on the Boundaries of Drinking in the 19th century Post-Partition Poland".

/ Benjamin Prinz, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar: Between laboratory and mass slaughterhouse: the production of heparin in Toronto in the 1930s

Almost everyone who undergoes surgery today is administered the anticoagulant heparin in the form of 'thrombosis injections'. The massive dependence of numerous medical practices on this physiological active ingredient goes hand in hand with a dependence on precarious animal sources of raw materials.
While heparin was first isolated from dog liver in 1916, the extraction source gradually shifted to cattle intestines during the 1930s and thus to the catchment area of centralized mass slaughterhouses. During this period, the metropolis of Toronto established itself as the most important location for the purification and standardization of the anticoagulant. There, both a research group led by Charles H. Best was searching for new methods of heparin extraction and an oligopoly of meat manufacturers was looking for sales markets for slaughterhouse waste.

Using this constellation as an example, the lecture links the history of early heparin research with that of the North American meat industry and shows the emergence of a medical-industrial dependency relationship that has the potential for catastrophe in the face of pandemics and climate change.

/ Mieke Roscher/Ulrike Heitholt, University of Kassel: Multi-perspective negotiation processes. Dealing with foot-and-mouth disease between 1890 and 1945 in Germany as an interspecific practice

The outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease in Germany in 1892, 1911 and 1938, for example, not only mark moments of crisis in health policy, but also provide insights into multi-layered social, agricultural and animal husbandry-related transformation processes. This article examines the handling of disease and animals in the period from 1890 to 1945 in a multi-perspective approach that takes equal account of state interventions, scientific developments, economic interests and agricultural practices between traditions and science-based innovations. While the state increasingly relied on scientifically based vaccination techniques in the course of the modernization and increasing professionalization of the veterinary system, ambivalent attitudes manifested themselves among many farmers. The resulting negotiation processes between state stakeholders, scientific institutions and decentralized farmers' interest groups led to complex discourses in which vaccination as an instrument of modern animal health policy was simultaneously understood as an intervention in traditional breeding and exhibition habits. It becomes clear how the major epidemics each acted as catalysts that drove long-term change in the relationship between the state, science and rural practice and also changed the way foot-and-mouth disease was viewed, from a temporary, curable animal disease to an epidemic to be rigorously combated. The multi-perspective approach presented here contributes to a differentiated presentation of the interrelationships between scientific knowledge processes, political regulations and social power relations in dealing with animal disease-related crises and thus makes a contribution to the debate on animal diseases and their far-reaching cultural, economic and social implications.

/ Dennis Yazici, IEG Mainz: Cattle-based Colonialism. Disruptions and continuities of cattle breeding in colonial Namibia (1892-1915)

Today's cattle herds in Namibia are partly a biological legacy of German colonialism. Livestock breeding - especially cattle breeding - was at the center of colonial efforts to legitimize colonial intervention. Under the paradigm of "rational cattle breeding", local African cattle populations - driven by biologistic racism and capitalist performance logic - were to be transformed and "improved". Despite the colonial transformation to a system of stationary farming, African pastoral practices of cattle breeding persisted and proved to be extremely persistent in view of the ecological conditions in the semi-arid region.
Colonial cattle breeding therefore found itself in a conflict-laden field of tension. On the one hand, there were the disruptions caused by the seizure of land and destruction of indigenous, pastoral societies, the development of mechanized farm infrastructure and the pursuit of colonial breeding goals: These were aimed at phenotypic uniformity of cattle herds and an increase in the performance of milk production and fattening capacity. On the other hand, the continuity of pastoral husbandry practices and the biological dependence on local, acclimatized cattle shaped colonial cattle breeding.
The lecture combines recent perspectives of agricultural, technical and environmental history. Thus, the cattle herds of colonial Namibia in their behavior and their physical adaptability to the colonial breeding strategies are placed at the center of the analysis.
Finally, the lecture discusses which processes of European cattle breeding were adapted or adopted in the former colony and highlights the enduring characteristics and elements of African cattle breeding.

/ Michael K. Schulz, University of Potsdam: Technology and animal welfare in pig farming from the German Empire to the 1930s

The rationalization and market orientation of the agricultural economy in the 19th century led to rapid growth in pig populations in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. This development was supported by the spread of theoretical and practical knowledge as well as technical innovations. While animal breeders propagated a performance-oriented view of pig farming, modern science - zoology, veterinary medicine and animal psychology - enabled a new understanding of animals and their needs. At the same time, the animal welfare movement developed in Germany. Although it focused more on animals in close social proximity to humans, it confronted society in the German Empire with new moral concepts regarding animal husbandry.
Using specialist literature, textbooks and guidebooks on pig husbandry as well as the Zeitschrift für Schweinezucht, Schweinemast und Schweinehaltung (1894-1943), the paper will present three aspects of pig life that changed fundamentally during the period under investigation as a result of new techniques. Firstly, so-called farrowing crates were introduced to protect newborn piglets from being crushed by their mothers. These forerunners of today's crates restricted the sows' freedom of movement and were therefore viewed critically from the outset. Secondly, to allow the pigs to move around outside and at the same time prevent them from rooting, some breeders recommended nose rings. Others criticized this method and made counter-suggestions, such as better organization of the time and place of grazing. Thirdly, under pressure from animal welfare associations, the hitherto common practice of culling pigs was gradually replaced by captive bolt guns and finally by the so-called electric "pig trap". The issue of animal welfare was always discussed by contemporaries with regard to these three aspects.

/ Alexander Silaen, University of Vienna: Colonial Ecologies: Insects, plantations and knowledge production in Sumatra

The colonial histories of insects in Sumatra illustrate that colonialism was a comprehensive epistemic, ecological and economic upheaval. In the late 19th century, forests and lowland plains of the east coast were radically altered by European tobacco plantations, creating new encounters between humans, plants and non-human animals.
Within plantation ecologies, non-human animals were declared "pests", health risks or "scientific objects". Not only insects, but also elephants, monkeys, snakes and birds came into conflict with the expanding plantation economy. Colonial infrastructures not only facilitated the transportation of tobacco, but also the shipment of grasshoppers, dragonflies, moths and beetles to European museums and zoos as well as to settler colonies. At the same time, ichneumon wasps were brought from the USA via Amsterdam to Sumatra to control tobacco moths.

Agrochemical experiments were carried out to control these threats to colonial profits: Pesticides, mosquito nets and spraying equipment were intended to protect the fragile monocultures. The colonial experimental stations, such as the Deli Proefstation in Medan, documented "insect attacks" in publications and European journals such as the Journal of Plant Diseases. Indonesian names for non-human animals, which were based on local knowledge systems, were often transferred and overwritten in colonial taxonomies.
These entanglements between science, plantation economy and ecological upheavals show that colonial knowledge production was closely linked to the restructuring of landscapes and the categorization of non-human life. This article examines these processes using colonial sources and Indonesian newspapers, focusing on insects from Sumatra and reflecting on how historiographical perspectives on these connections must change.

/ Sarah Ehlers, Research Institute for the History of Technology and Science Deutsches Museum (Munich): Harmful Animals - Livestock - One Health? Birds, locusts, mosquitoes and cattle in the debate on hazardous pesticides in developing countries in the 1970s to 1990s

Since the 1970s, hazardous pesticides such as DDT have been widely available in the Global South. Previously banned in most industrialized countries because of their environmental hazards, they were now part of development aid and health programs. Here, the highly potent chemicals were used largely unregulated and without awareness-raising and protective measures, which led to a wide range of social criticism and calls for scientific evidence and attempts at regulation in international politics. Although the controversy centered primarily on human pesticide deaths and human health and livelihoods, animals played crucial roles in several respects. On the one hand, as "pest animals", they were at the center of pest control. As part of malaria campaigns, large-scale pesticide spraying campaigns were aimed at destroying Anopheles mosquitoes, while agricultural development aid used highly toxic pesticides against animal pests such as locusts, rodents and birds. On the other hand, "farm animals" had to be protected both by and from pesticides, for example by immersing cattle in a pesticide bath to protect them from parasites. However, due to their high toxicity and improper application, contact with chemicals often led to the death of individual animals. The toxins also accumulated in the animals' bodies, which meant, among other things, that their meat could no longer be exported to industrialized countries due to stricter regulations. The criticism of the use of dangerous pesticides emphasized the inseparability of man and nature with such examples: the improvement of the world food situation could not be achieved by poisoning individual elements of an ecosystem, because toxins could never be limited in this way. In this respect, this criticism also reveals the contours of a One Health approach, which sees the health of humans, animals and ecosystems as interdependent.

At the turn of the 21st century, repositories of natural history specimens reestablished the significance of their collections by designating them the new role of saving biodiversity in a decaying world. Ironically, the collections of these research centers have been intricately tied to histories of violence and ecological destruction. Developing imperial histories of natural history collections further, this twofold session brings together stories of extraction, preservation, and (scientific) knowledge production that attend to practices of killing, hunting, displacement, experimentation, looting, confinement, and care. The papers focus on different locations and species to analyze both the creation of knowledge in natural history and the preservation of animal specimens through the lens of violence. What can we learn about the multiple forms of violence through natural history specimens?

In Part II: Caring, we attend to various practices of care involved in the creation and maintenance of natural history collections. How are violence and care related in turning animals into living or dead natural history specimens? How can we understand practices of neglect or desertion? The contributions examine violence and care in practices of killing, keeping alive, experimentation, conservation and knowledge production in the field, zoo, laboratory, museum display and depot. Lisette Jong discusses matters of care and violence in research on orangutans' ability to speak in the 18th and 21st centuries. Hannah Kressig examines violence in keeping bonobos alive for experimental purposes in a medical field lab in formerly Belgian Congo. Annekathrin Krieger tells the story of the life and afterlife of chimpanzee Mafuka, who was displayed alive in the Dresden Zoological Garden in the 19th century. Hanna Wüste focuses on fish and mollusks, collected in the South Pacific by European trading companies, that today prompt conversations around preservation and decay.

/ Lisette Jong, Amsterdam: Can Orangutans Speak?

Tracing the trajectories of the orangutans dissected by the Dutch anatomist and naturalist Petrus Camper in the 1770s and the research questions asked of them, I zoom in on the question: can orangutans speak? This question entertained the 18th century debate about the place of the orangutan in natural history and in relation to the human. By means of comparative anatomical research, Camper concluded that orangutans were physically incapable of speech and this supposedly settled the debate. However, the question of speech was not entirely put to rest. In a 21st century iteration, captive orangutan Rocky was found capable of producing human speech sounds. A research team led by primatologist Adriano Lameira employed the means of experimental and acoustic research to prove volitional voice control in the orangutan. They argued that this finding is crucial for understanding the evolution of human speech.
One of the orangutans that ended up on Petrus Camper's dissection table in 1776 is historically known to have been the first orangutan that survived the journey from Borneo and lived in captivity in the Netherlands from June 1776 - January 1777. What do we learn when we read her story and that of Rocky through one another? About the ways they were silenced or made to speak? The analysis brings into view legacies of colonialism and human exceptionalism and the intricate entanglement of violence and care in displacement, captivity and scientific knowledge production.

/ Hannah Kressig, MPWIG Berlin: Becoming Bonobo. On the Discovery and Collection of Bonobos in Tervuren's Africa Museum

Since the 1990s, bonobos have gained popularity as the "make-love-not-war" ape, symbolizing as a peaceful evolutionary counterpoint to the bellicose chimpanzees. However, my talk will address the violent history behind the discovery of the "hippie" ape.
Bonobos were described as a species distinct from chimpanzees only a century ago, based on a peculiar skull in the Museum of the Belgian Congo (now AfricaMuseum) in Tervuren. I will focus on the subsequent quest of the museum to acquire more specimens of this "last" great ape. Central is the connection to a medical laboratory near Stanleyville in Belgian Congo where both chimpanzees and bonobos were captured for polio vaccine research during the late 1950s. Some of their remains were sent to the museum, where they later served for studies on human evolution.
Tracing the bonobos' journey from the wild to the lab to the museum, I'll explore different human-primate encounters in which the dividing lines between human and animals were constantly renegotiated. Rather than focusing on a collecting expedition, my talk highlights the role of a field lab, thus situating natural history collections not only within practices of hunting but also within the equally violent practices of keeping animals alive for experimentation. Overall, my talk aims at a better understanding of the entangled history of natural history collections with biomedical and anthropological primate research, revealing their connections to colonial policies.

/ Annekathrin Krieger, Network for Provenance Research in Lower Saxony: Multiple Forms of Care. The Life and Afterlife of the Chimpanzee Mafuka in Dresden

Like many non-human primates that were brought to Europe from Africa or Asia during the long 19th century, the chimpanzee Mafuka, who lived at the Dresden Zoological Garden between 1873 and 1875, was assigned to very different roles: she was a (traveling) companion, zoo animal, capital, model, research and museum object. Numerous human and non-human actors were involved in these stages and transformation processes. These processes were also negotiated in different spaces. The keeping and research of non-human primates as supposed borderline beings between humans and animals opened up debates on evolutionary biology, behavioral psychology, educational science and racism, which were violently tested on Mafuka's body. This violence was mostly justified as care and thus legitimized. But which role of the chimpanzee, whether alive or dead, required which form of care? How did the tension between violence and care manifest itself and how was it perceived? And what agency was given to the chimpanzee in the care she received?

/ Hanna Wüste, Basel: Mausoleums of Knowledge: Colonial Trade, Biodiversity Loss, and Decay in Collections

Natural history collections embody both the creation of knowledge and the loss of biodiversity. While intended as repositories of scientific inquiry, they also serve as mausoleums, housing dead organisms that continue to decay despite preservation efforts. This paper is set to explore the tension between the museum as a site of conservation and as a space of inevitable loss. How does decay shape our understanding of specimens, collections, and ownership? As an attempt to find beginnings of modern day conundrums, this study examines the colonial origins of these collections and their entanglement with capitalist expansion, by tracing the steps of the German trading house Joh. Ces. Godeffroy & Sohn in the South Pacific in the 19th century. A focal point will be the contributions of zoologist Eduard Graeffe. Cesar Godeffroy established the Museum Godeffroy in 1861, aiming to amass natural history and ethnographic collections from the South Seas. Graeffe, commissioned by Godeffroy, conducted extensive research and collection expeditions in the Pacific. As fish and mollusks represent widely exchanged goods in this area and are also positioned differently in a forcefield of durability, currency and consumption, they are the main focus of this study. By examining these specimens at the intersection of scientific ambition, economic interest, and natural decay, this study highlights the fragility of knowledge production and the shifting value of biological remains over time.

In few spaces and relationships are animal-human relationships as closely related and at the same time as diverse as in the laboratory or in animal experiments in medical research. Not only can almost any animal be or become a laboratory animal, but the specific role of the animals in the research setting also varies and changes the animal-human relationship: the standardized mouse in the cellar becomes a valuable subject in an experimental setup - or a threat if the experiments involve infectious pathogens. The animal-human relationship in the context of medical research is multifaceted: for example, the laboratory animal models humans or another animal or their diseases. At the same time, the laboratory animal can also be (only) a passage or transportation container, for example for the shipment of cell cultures. The contributions in this section approach animal-human relationships in medical research from different, complementary perspectives.

/ Volker Roelcke, University of Giessen: Animal-based - the animal model of human disease: Inherent problems and career of a central concept in medical disease research

Since the second half of the 19th century, physicians have been attempting to experimentally model and analyze human disease in animals and then apply the knowledge thus gained to humans. In addition to an epistemological objective, the animal model also had an ethical dimension from the outset, namely to reduce the risks of disease research on humans. The article traces the different significance of these two dimensions in various historical constellations and reconstructs some of the inherent problems of the idea and practice of the animal model.

/ Hanna Lucia Worliczek, Bielefeld University: The mouse on the Orient Express. Of mice, humans and cats in toxoplasmosis research from 1940 onwards

In June 1949, the Viennese pediatrician Otto Thalhammer smuggled mice infected with Toxoplasma gondii on an overnight train from Paris to Vienna - a generous gift from a French colleague and the basis for Thalhammer's work on the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of congenital toxoplasmosis in the following decades. Triggered by the diaplacental transmission of Toxoplasma during pregnancy, congenital toxoplasmosis of fetuses, newborns and infants is a rare but serious and sometimes fatal disease. After the first clinical description in the 1930s, the life cycle of the pathogen was elucidated around 1970 and transmission routes between cats, farm animals, mice and humans were identified. The episode on the night train sheds light on the diverse interactions between mice, cats and humans in the research, diagnosis and prevention of connatal toxoplasmosis: from mice and cats as living "means of production" for the maintenance of parasite strains in the laboratory, to the use of the mouse as a model organism, to the beloved domestic cat as a source of infection for pregnant women and humans as accidental but welcome test subjects after laboratory accidents. The article looks at the material cultures of research, questions the epistemic roles and ontologies of animals and examines the changing roles of humans and other animals within this epistemic economy.

/ Axel C. Hüntelmann, Josephinum, Medical University of Vienna: "Care and Breeding of Laboratory Animals". Animal-human relationships in the laboratory and the emergence of laboratory animal science

In 1950, the handbook "Care and Breeding of Laboratory Animals" was published in the USA, summarizing knowledge about feeding, handling and diseases of laboratory animals. In Germany, the situation was very different. Here, knowledge still had to be acquired practically in the laboratory or from publications on other topics. The standardization of laboratory animal breeding, the institutionalization and professionalization of laboratory animal science began relatively late in the 1950s, whereas in the USA, with the Witstar Rat and the JAX mouse, standardized model organisms were bred (and researched) in veritable mouse factories at an early stage. Since the end of the 19th century, medical research has not only required more animals in terms of quantity, but also standardized animals. Scientists acquired practical knowledge about the animals used in experiments by interacting with them. The agency - understood here as the power of the laboratory animals - meant that experimental systems and the interaction between humans and animals had to be constantly adapted. The careful handling of laboratory animals was important because they became valuable subjects in the context of the experiments and because the social demands on the treatment of animals increased. This article outlines this relationship in the laboratory and the emergence of laboratory animal science between 1910 and around 1970.

/ Max Buschmann, TU Munich: Laboratory animals in the risk society. The securitization of research at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, ca. 1970-1990

This article examines human-animal relationships at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry (MPIP). Using three highlights, the presentation will focus on why and how research with animals became a risk factor in the 1970s and 1980s. In the buildings of both the "Clinical Institute" (Munich) and the "Theoretical Institute" (Martinsried) of the MPIP, experiments were carried out with animals for basic psychological, genetic and neurobiological research. Firstly, this raised questions about the accommodation and protection of the sometimes wayward and/or sick animals, some of which were kept in their own "stables". Secondly, radioactive materials were used in experiments at the MPIP, so that special safety precautions were necessary. Thirdly, however, the Institutes were also attacked by critics from the militant left and the animal liberation movement. With the help of theoretical approaches to the "risk society" (Ulrich Beck) and from the "securitization studies", the lecture will thus work out which practices of securitization were established in order to secure research with animals, defend it against criticism and attacks and, in some cases, make it less visible to the public.

As early as the 19th century, physiological experiments were based on ideas of exemplary but largely concealed regularities in structures and processes that had to be revealed through experimentation. The repeated performance of experiments on living organisms, mostly animals, in conjunction with the systematic storage of the traces produced, made it possible to identify similar sequences in temporal processes. This interweaving of media technology and organisms was continued in the 20th century under the auspices of new information technologies (IT), such as cybernetics, bionics and biomathematics. These emphasized the analogy between biological and technical processes and made pattern recognition a central paradigm for researching natural and developing technical systems. Just as the cyberneticist Wiener juxtaposed supposedly heterogeneous elements in his major work "Cybernetics" published in 1948, bionicists in the 1960s and later "modern biomathematicians [...] attempted to make statements about causal relationships, about a mechanism of action" of a biological nature (Bühler, 1972), or in the 1970s to understand computational systems with the help of biological knowledge. The sometimes practiced interconnection of animals in technical dispositives of experimentation and measurement opens up perspectives on the epistemic function of animal actors in the history of science and technology. Using three case studies, the section examines the transformation of experimental logics around the middle of the 20th century - from instrumental to informatic approaches. In doing so, it explores the question of how animals functioned as active interfaces in the emergence of new knowledge and technology regimes. They served not only as experimental objects and epistemic models, but also as a source of inspiration for technological developments and as stakeholders in the linking of biology and IT.

/ Christoph Borbach, University of Siegen: An "order in the diversity of seemingly completely heterogeneous bird song structures": Albrecht Faber's basic bioacoustic research

The lecture looks at an institutional origin of bioacoustic animal sound research: the "Research Center for Comparative Animal Sound and Animal Expression Research" in Tübingen, founded in 1951 on the initiative of Albrecht Faber.
The decisive turning point in Faber's work was the integration of animal voices into a technical-visual dispositive. While Faber initially used notation and onomatopoeia in his studies on the vocalizations of horrors from the end of the 1920s, he began using new media technology in animal studies in the 1950s: audio tape to create sonograms and oscillograms. In contrast to phonographic animal voice recordings, which had already been archived earlier for documentation purposes, Faber's research was characterized by the precise reconstruction of bioacoustic codes in the medium of tape technology.
Technical equipment not only allowed animal voices to be analyzed more precisely, but these media also transformed what it meant to "systematically see few things" in animal voice analysis, in Foucault's words. In terms of Faber's task, this meant in practice: pattern recognition, which did not attempt to decode the meaning of individual sounds, but rather to identify recurring structures and their variations. Animal sounds are no longer songs, but in Faber's experimental practice, as will be shown, have become a unit of information.

/ Rudolf Seising, Deutsches Museum (Munich): Learning like an octopus? An apparatus of the 1950s

Octopods, octopuses - eight-armed squid - are among the molluscs that are often described as "intelligent". In the 1950s, the English neuroanatomists John Zachary Young and Brian Blundell Boycott experimented with these animals at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples in order to study their ability to learn. In particular, they trained the animals to attack a visual stimulus. Young was Professor of Anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine at University College London, where he had the existing apparatus improved with engineering support. After the electrical engineer Wilfred Kenelm Taylor met and joined the research team, the direction of the technical work in this group changed. Taylor built an apparatus to simulate the learning behavior of the octopods under investigation. His technical construction was one of the first devices that could recognize simple patterns such as circles or squares, written letter sequences and faces. This was one of the early results of bionic research, which became known as "learning machines" and was researched and developed independently of the artificial intelligence systems that emerged around the same time.
The lecture describes the development of an early "learning machine", which was modeled on an animal and can be regarded as the predecessor of today's machine learning systems.

/ Dinah Pfau, Deutsches Museum (Munich): In the eyes of the cat: Neuronal vision in animals and technology

The cat as an organism and technical object in the structure of physiological experimental systems played a central role in the investigation of the sense of sight. Inspired by the writings of Hubel and Wiesel, researchers Werner von Seelen and Klaus Peter Hofmann also combined mathematical modeling and digital simulations with experiments on the animal's visual cortex in the 1970s.
Their approach to modelling the spatio-temporal representation of visual stimuli in nerve networks aimed to understand processes of localization of movement patterns and to solve a central problem of pattern recognition: the separation of foreground and background. The knowledge gained was incorporated into the development of digital technology. With the founding of the Institute for Neuroinformatics at the Ruhr University Bochum in the 1990s, von Seelen continued this technological focus, while the physiological experiment and the role of the cat as a pattern generator and interpreter became less important.
By placing the cat in the history of epistemic practices of pattern recognition, the lecture examines the changing role of the animal organism in an increasingly information-theoretically oriented experimental research and technological development.

/ Susanne Schregel, University of Copenhagen: Commentary

/ Friederike Frenzel, University of Münster: "[A]ll the wonders [...] that God has heaped into any worm". Freshwater polyps in the experimental research of the Enlightenment

"What light have polyps shed on both natural history and philosophy?" asked the translator Goeze in the introduction to the German translation of Abraham Trembley's "Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire d'un genre de polypes d'eau douce", published in 1775. Although the discovery of polyps, as described in Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's "Abhandlung von den Federbusch-Polypen in den Göttingischen Gewässern", had already been "prophesied" by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, they were not actually described until around 1703 by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. Trembley's publication in 1744 triggered a veritable polyp mania among the researchers of his time: the organism found was not only able to move independently but, when cut in half, it regenerated into two complete individuals. The widespread distribution of polyps and the ease with which experiments could be imitated favored the popular practice of polyp experiments in research and teaching. This must be seen in the context of an empirical turn in natural science in the 18th century, in which hypotheses were increasingly accepted by scholars only in connection with observational data and experiments that were carried out repeatedly and in a controlled manner. The animal experiment thus found a new establishment and spread.
The empirical data obtained in this way was immediately theorized again, for example by Julien Offray de La Mettrie in his concept of the "animal machine". Based on his observations and experiments with the tirelessly regenerating polyps, Blumenbach formulated the theory of the "formative instinct", which rejected preformationism in favor of epigenesis.
In the complex of a newly forming and regulating natural science of the Enlightenment, which in its modern form always argues anthropocentrically, the inconspicuous freshwater polyp thus occupies a decisive, exemplary interface.

/Oliver Hochadel, Institució Milà i Fontanals, CSIC, Barcelona: Schifffahrt mit Tiger. Alois Kraus' animal transport from Java to Vienna, 1878

In April 1878, Alois Kraus (1840-1926), "sub-inspector" of the imperial menagerie at Schönbrunn, was entrusted with a difficult mission. He was to travel to Java to collect a diplomatic gift: two tigers. However, his cargo ultimately also included three panthers, two lions, an orangutan, several monkeys, gazelles, snakes, birds, plants and ethnographic objects. Kraus' journey and his return to Vienna at the beginning of October became a media event. The zookeeper was celebrated as a hero. He had single-handedly brought back half a zoo from the other side of the world. Allegedly, all 84 animals survived the two-month journey over water and land; the mortality rate for such animal transports was generally extremely high.

The lecture will reconstruct Kraus' journey in two ways: on the one hand from the official media perspective (numerous newspaper articles and his own report), and on the other hand from the non-public perspective of the court administration. Their sources describe numerous challenges in detail. How was Kraus able to acquire, feed and transport such a large number of different animals? Topics such as the exploding costs, the construction of suitable cages and the difficult crossing on steamers and trains put the logistics of animal transportation at the center of the lecture. In 1878, Kraus, who came from a humble background, already had 20 years of experience in handling "exotic" animals, especially on the high seas. When he was appointed director of the menagerie in October 1879, the liberal press denied his suitability as he had not completed any academic studies.
The overarching context of the lecture is the acceleration and multiplication of the volume of international animal trade between Europe and Southeast Asia after the opening of the Suez Canal. What specific zootechnical knowledge was needed for this and how was it generated?

/ Carlotta Wolter, Georg August University Göttingen: The 'Canis Sovieticus' - Service dog breeding under Stalinism

Since the founding of the USSR, the need and interest in the use of dogs for the state increased: in addition to military and police service, the animals were used in the agricultural sector and as sled dogs in the northern regions of the Soviet Union. Numerous guidebooks from the first third of the 20th century promised to make the 'right' service dog breeding and training accessible to every dog lover by freeing the breeding and training methods described in them from any 'humanization' and relying on a purely 'scientific-objective' basis, the field of 'cynology'.

In my lecture, I would like to show how the dog's body in the Soviet
breeding system as a living illustrative object of the Lamarckian theories of the biologist Ivan Michurin and his successor Trofim Lysenko. To this end, I discuss both the breeding criteria and practices that were to produce the ideal 'service dog body' and the concrete biopolitical measures that were used to realize the reproduction and 'elimination' of certain offspring. The theoretical framework is located at the intersection of the history of science and the history of the body and places the corporeal as a product of scientific discourses and practices at the center of historical observation. Furthermore, in the sense of a spatial history of humans and animals, the lecture will examine how the qualitative demarcation between the 'dog breeds' manifested itself in the spatial design of so-called 'breeding shows'. The aim of the lecture is to raise awareness of perspectives on the animal counterpart that diverged from Western ideas, and thus to make the theoretical pillars of human-animal studies, which are usually embedded in the political categories of Anglo-European culture, productive for the Eastern European region as well.

/ Martina Schlünder, Charité Berlin: Tarzan with the apes. An (almost) public animal liberation in Münster and its consequences

In the fall of 1984, the Max Planck Society received mail from "Tarzan". In a letter of confession, he explained to Germany's most important research society the reasons for his spectacular animal liberation action at the University of Münster, in which, among other things, 21 monkeys from a clinical research group funded by the Max Planck Society were freed. This was not the first animal rescue operation that the Max Planck Society has had to deal with. What was new about it, however, was the public nature of the action, because although it took place at night and in secret, this in no way prevented "Tarzan" from photographing the action and later selling the pictures to the highest bidder in the tabloid press. With foresight, the Max Planck Society organized a national TV press conference at lightning speed and even before the pictures of the action could be published, in order to bring its version of events to the public.
The background to this battle for images and their interpretative sovereignty was the impending amendment of the Animal Protection Act, which was intended to harmonize the inadequate West German standards of animal protection with European norms, thus putting the Max Planck Society under enormous pressure and ultimately driving it to new forms of public relations work, lobbying and scientific communication.
In my lecture, I will follow the various stakeholders in this conflict - animals included. In doing so, I will be guided by Donna Haraway's dictum "staying with the trouble", so as not to explain away the conflict between animals, researchers and opponents of animal experimentation.

/ Vera Straetmanns, Ruhr University Bochum: Plants and animals in comparison: The program of early plant psychology

Plants dominate the earth and are essential for animal and human life. Long neglected scientifically and philosophically, new insights into their abilities are now increasingly bringing plants into the focus of scientific theory. One controversial aspect of this is the question of whether comparisons between animals and plants enrich or distort research. Should animal physiological methods be transferred to plants? Can concepts of animal behavior be applied to plants? Or does the fundamental difference between plants require their own methodology and language?
In order to create new impulses for this discussion, I will show in my lecture how botanists and theoretical biologists of the early 20th century explored the unique properties of plants. The focus will be on the research program of the "plant psychologists" around Raoul Heinrich Francé (1874-1943). Francé introduced "plant psychology" in 1909 as a new paradigm that assumed mental activity in plants as a "working hypothesis". His aim was to revolutionize plant physiology and explain plant processes that could not be understood within the mechanistic paradigm. The relationship between plants and animals played a central role for Francé. Based on the continuity principle of developmental theory, the assumption of a soul and cognitive abilities in animals led him to the conclusion that plants also have a soul. He also worked explicitly with analogies, for example between plant and animal sensory organs. I will analyze the methods and assumptions of plant psychologists and place them in the botanical research context of the early 20th century. This historical perspective expands our understanding of plant philosophy and helps to theoretically ground current debates on the relationship between animals and plants.

/ Jan Brinkmann, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen: Feeling the bees. Insect research, emotions and the senses around 1800

In the late 18th century, a remarkable boom in bee science publications can be observed. When reading these texts, it quickly becomes clear that they were not written by indifferent chroniclers of entomological knowledge, but by bee enthusiasts who were fascinated and awestruck by their object of study. At the end of the early modern period, the study of insects was regarded as an emotionally charged activity that required the use of all the senses. Following a physicotheological view of science, the sensory observation of tiny hymenoptera not only made it possible to draw conclusions about insects. From the point of view of contemporaries, entomological findings always referred to divine creation, whose holistic order could be studied in the delicate bodies of living or preserved insects.

As a whole series of bee-scientific writings show, entomological research meant not only observing an object of knowledge, but also smelling, tasting, hearing and providing it with a religious-cultural index. Early modern bee researchers presented all these sensory impressions as access to a comprehensive, sensually mediated knowledge of God, which significantly permeated their perception of the animals and evoked a whole ensemble of emotions. What a bee was towards the end of the 18th century, how it was conceptualized and represented as an epistemic thing, therefore also depended on the associations, emotions and experiences that its sensual presence evoked.

The lecture, conceived as a case study, explores the cultural meanings, affective charges and knowledge-constitutive effects of these olfactory, gustatory and auditory perceptions as a cross-species practice. According to the thesis, the bee provides new insights into the more-than-human, affective and sensual dimensions of the history of science and animals.

/ Anja Breljak, University of Potsdam: When animals become sensitive media: A different history of knowledge in modernity

Animal sensitivities have played an important role in the registration and testing of physical changes since the middle of the 18th century. From 1750 at the latest, when Albrecht Haller from Göttingen made animals a systematic component of physiological research with his experiments on the sensitivity and irritability of body parts and triggered the first wave of animal experiments in Europe, the question of sensitivity became the focus of scientific knowledge production. Research into and use of the sensitivity of animal bodies and their components can be traced from 1750 to the present day: For example, in electricity theory, where frogs were used as measuring devices; in nuclear research, which investigated the adaptability and genetic changes of millions of laboratory animals to radioactive substances; or in drug testing and medical diagnostics, where mice, rabbits or horseshoe crabs, among others, are used as bio-assays and the so-called "animal consumption" is still essential.

The aim of this presentation is to put such examples of the operationalization of animal sensitivity into perspective by means of the concept of "sensitive media". This conceptual proposal allows us to illuminate the historical role of mediality and mediation in animal-based testing procedures and to focus on the extractivist practices that accompany them. However, it is also important to recognize that matter, which reacts sensitively to certain physical changes, forms the basis of modern media technologies such as photography, microphony and radio. The media-scientific examination of the operationalization of sensitive matter then makes it possible to grasp the larger context of this medial change towards sensitive media and the dependence of modern knowledge production on them.

/ Paul Jacob Moersener, Bergische Universität Wuppertal: Animals in front of the camera. Film as a research technology in behavioral biology in the 1960s

"Animals in front of the camera" is the name of a documentary series produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk in 1977, but animals were and still are a popular motif not only on television. At the Max Planck Institute of Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen, which was founded in 1958 by biologists Erich von Holst and Konrad Lorenz, numerous films were made, especially in the 1960s, to research animal movement and behavior. Almost all of the scientists who worked for Lorenz's department and its branch office in Wuppertal used film and film technology systematically and methodically in their behavioral biology studies. For the researchers, film meant the possibility of recording their observations in the "time-image" (Deleuze) in order to be able to consult it repeatedly. Slow-motion and time-lapse techniques opened up epistemic potential, while the 16mm cine film reels were conceived as "motion preserves" (winders) and were thus seen as analogous to the classical specimens of biology. On the one hand, the lecture will focus on the study by zoologist Wolfgang Wickler, who used film recordings to explain the mimetic behavior of some fish species. On the other hand, the work of the Austrian zoologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt will be considered, whose research films on the prey capture of weasels in 1961 triggered a scientific controversy. Using these examples, the affinity of a specialized zoological discipline to the medium of film will be highlighted and the relationship of the two researchers to their objects of knowledge, the animals in front of the camera, will be explored.

How did physicians cross borders between states and political blocs during the Cold War to collaborate with colleagues in neighboring countries or around the world? The section is dedicated to such transnational dynamics with a focus on state-socialist Europe. The metaphor of the "Iron Curtain" - and thus the idea of a rigid separation of systems - has been challenged for some time by the concept of a partially permeable "nylon curtain" (György Péteri). Historians of medicine and science have also examined the exchange between East and West in this sense and asked how people, data, knowledge, vaccines or technical equipment crossed bloc borders in one direction or the other. The international ERC research group LEVIATHAN, from which the section's contributions originate, follows on from this.
We want to use professional interactions to describe how the (im)permeability of borders in the age of bloc confrontation affected medical research and treatment practice and how stakeholders from the healthcare sector 'made' borders. How permeable were borders at different times, in certain political constellations? What barriers existed within the socialist bloc? Did border crossings between East and West soften the bloc's borders or did they reinforce them?
The four contributions report on the fight against sexually transmitted diseases, aggression research, heart surgery and kidney transplants; their settings alternate between Central Eastern and Western Europe and the USA. The spectrum of case studies combines micro and macro levels: it includes the treatment of an East German patient and the professional network of a Czech pharmacologist, but it also deals with the activities of larger organizations such as international professional societies, the WHO and platforms for the exchange of donor organs.

/ Fruzsina Müller, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin: International cooperation in the fight against sexually transmitted diseases in divided Europe (1945-1989)
The fight against sexually transmitted infections (STI) has a long history. In recent decades, both prophylactic and therapeutic measures have been studied in the 19th and 20th centuries, but research has focused on the national level: on expert debates, public health measures, legislation and educational campaigns in individual countries. The role of international organizations, such as the International Union against Venereal Diseases and Treponematoses (IUVDT) or the World Health Organization (WHO), remained underexposed. The lecture attempts to close this gap by presenting international and transnational activities in this field. The focus will be on a single method in the prophylactic spectrum, namely contact tracing, i.e. the search for the source of infection or potentially infected persons. The aim of this epidemiological method is to find as many sexual partners of an infected person as possible and to treat them prophylactically. This old method experienced a revival in the 1960s and 1970s after the enthusiasm for penicillin had died down and STI rates soared again. How did the idea of extended contact tracing spread among individual doctors in Europe? And what was the purpose of mapping sexual contacts within a community?

/ Alexandra Geisthövel, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin: "Budapest, we have a kidney": The beginnings of European organ exchange organizations (1965-1980)

When kidney transplantation began to establish itself as a clinical procedure in the 1960s, this was associated with the emergence of a type of organization that transcended space and borders: Donor Kidney Exchange Networks. As donated kidneys could only be stored for a limited period of time, the focus was initially on the proximity of cooperating centers. In Europe, for example, transplant surgeons in Hamburg networked with their Danish and Swedish colleagues, while another early network was made up of participants from southern Germany, northern Austria and northern Switzerland. On a larger scale, the same applied to the transnational organizations Eurotransplant and Scandiatransplant, which still exist today, and the socialist Intertransplant, which was dissolved in 1991. On the other hand, there were also national (France Transplant, UK Transplant Service) and regional solutions (North Italy Transplant Program) as well as a certain trend towards national standardization in the 1970s, including the regulation of cost reimbursement. In addition, the European exchange organizations were networked both with each other and with their counterparts in other parts of the world, sometimes across large geographical distances and across political blocs, which will be illustrated here using the example of the GDR. The multi-layered dynamics of border demarcation can therefore be analyzed succinctly in this complex and changeable constellation.

/ Tomáš Filip, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin: Medical cooperation in patient care between two Eastern Bloc countries

After the Second World War, cardiosurgery developed into an independent medical specialty. Within the Eastern Bloc, the ČSSR was able to keep pace with global progress. Patients from socialist countries were also treated in the specialized cardiosurgical centers, for whom adequate treatment options were not always available in their own country. This gave rise to a form of medical cooperation that transcended national borders and was seen as an expression of socialist solidarity.

The personal story of Annette, who was operated on as a six-year-old in Brno in 1966, offers an insight into this special cooperation between the ČSSR and the GDR. However, her example raises more general questions, which this article attempts to clarify: Since when and under what circumstances did this medical cooperation exist? What were the contractual requirements and regulations, to what extent did improvisation have to take place? What criteria determined which patients from the GDR were treated in the ČSSR? How was funding regulated and what influence did the state have on this medical diplomacy? The analysis of these questions will not only attempt to show the dynamics of professional cooperation, but also illustrate the political dimension of medical care in the Eastern Bloc.

/ Jakub Střelec, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin: Aggressive behavior in the laboratory. Czechoslovak pharmacology and international aggression research in the 1970s and 1980s

In the 1970s and 1980s, aggression and violence increasingly came to the fore not only in public debate but also in science. A general trend in aggression research led to sociologically and psychologically oriented approaches being increasingly replaced by biological perspectives. Against this backdrop, scientists began to focus more intensively on the brain, particularly on the role of neurotransmitters as potential triggers of aggressive and violent behavior. Current historiography describes this development primarily as a consequence of technical progress made possible by innovative laboratory methods in Western medicine. I would like to expand this narrative using the example of the Czechoslovak physician and pharmacologist Miloslav Kršiak, who conducted experiments on aggressive behavior in mice at the Pharmacological Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. I ask to what extent the growing interest in biological studies on aggression was influenced by scientific collaborations with colleagues from the socialist bloc. At the same time, I am interested in what these transnational interactions actually looked like: What networks were Czechoslovak pharmacologists able to establish and what strategies did they have to use in order to travel abroad?