Overview
Seattle would not exist without animals. For millennia, salmon, deer, and elk sustained Salish people on the shores and hills that would become the city. Animals as spirits helped them understood their place in the cosmos. Oxen and horses pulled white newcomers' wagons across the continent and these same animals helped log the forest that gave way to the new town. They graded streets and provided transportation within town and to nearby farms. Cattle, chickens, pigs, sheep, and goats provided milk, eggs, and meat to sustain city-dwellers’ bodies. In these relations, it was not always clear who was domesticating whom, as animals profited from their human allies (in Seattle as elsewhere) to proliferate in numbers much greater than their cousins who remained wild. In the twentieth century as well, even as people chose to exclude many domestic animals from the city -- both because automobiles replaced horses and because the middle class found livestock incompatible with urban living -- animals' role remained vital. Cats and dogs were ever more important in creating a sense of home and family. By the end of the century, city people were consuming more meat than ever and humans were using animals in the development and testing of pharmaceuticals. Although these animals were increasingly hidden, they were ever more present in city dwellers' bodies.
The story of animals in Seattle, as in other cities, is the story of three animal borderlands: those separating and connecting human and animal, domestic and wild, pet and livestock. Although we often take these for granted and assume them to be clearcut, unproblematic lines, they are better described as borderlands -- permeable, changing over time, variable across cultures, and difficult to trace precisely. At each step of Seattle's history, these borderlands have been important to human struggles over space and identities -- struggles that intertwine. They have shaped how we think about home, neighborhood, and city, and about the people who live in those places. They helped define boundaries between civilization and wildness, between city and country, between home and the world of work. Each of these borderlands has a history; none of them is inevitable.
We typically take for granted a line between human and animal and thereby ignore the animal contribution to urban history altogether. Historians generally see the animal role as inconsequential, assuming agency is central to history and that animals do not exercise humanlike agency that involves rational thought and planning. There are surely differences in the ways humans and animals think, just as there are differences in how, say, bears and sheep think. Yet animals shape their world through their actions, and much of the human influence on the world is unintentional. The fact that the human-animal borderland has a history becomes clear when we consider the differing worldviews of Salish people and European newcomers at the time of Seattle's founding. Salish people did not draw a sharp human-animal distinction. They recognized the active animal role in history as they sought animal spirits as allies in understanding the cosmos and in gaining success in life and as they told stories of a Myth Time when animals were people. Europeans, by contrast, assumed human dominion and a clear line between human and animal.
We also take for granted a line between domestic and wild, with cities and rural areas as places for domestic animals, with woodlands and mountains as places for wild animals. This distinction is not inevitable. Rather, it came to Puget Sound with the arrival of European newcomers. They brought specific domestic animals that were key to their economic system and their vision of life, and eliminated animals that threatened this world: wolves, coyotes, cougars, and bears. Yet even today, many animals blur these distinctions. They thrive in the borderlands -- from crows and squirrels who live as wild animals in the human-built environment to salmon raised in hatcheries till they swim free in rivers and oceans.
Finally, we rarely question the line that separates pets from livestock -- a distinction that is regularly made manifest when we serve up the processed flesh of livestock to our pets in their dinner bowls. Yet this borderland has a history as well. When Seattle was a town, animals more regularly crossed this borderland, as farm animals could be loved in their childhood and eaten when full grown, as cats and dogs were (sometimes) loved, but also had jobs to do. Only in the twentieth century would it come to seem natural that pets and livestock have such different lives.
These three borderlands -- real yet changing and permeable -- go together to make a system we might call the divided regime -- a system which assumes human dominion, which views the city and rural lands as places for domestic animals, and wilderness as a place for wild animals, which celebrates sentiment toward pets and hides utilitarian relations with livestock. This system emerged because it allowed city-dwellers things of real value -- the companionship of beloved animals, animal labor, abundant meat, and medical break-throughs. It also emerged because it allowed first the white middle class and then city-dwellers more broadly to define their home and their city as places of progress, of material prosperity, of health, and of kindness. Humans and animals helped create these lines and regularly blurred them. In so doing, they helped make Seattle a city.
Send comments to fbrown at u dot washington dot edu.
Last updated September 20, 2009