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animal
biography
re-framing
animal lives
Edited by
André Krebber
Mieke Roscher
Palgrave Studies in
Animals and Literature
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA
Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing
an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of
human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences
that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology
and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-
disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the
separation of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and
political stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we
locate and understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the
‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as
the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have
codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly
other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to
animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of
animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read
as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human
concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary
animal studies by tracing the engagement of such fi guration with the material
lives of animals. It examines textual c ultures as variously embodying a debt to
or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic
engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate
natural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary
texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the discipline’s
key thematic concerns, genres and critical m ethods. The series focuses on
literary prose and poetry, while also a ccommodating related discussion of the
full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to fine
art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera) with
which English studies now engages.
Series Board:
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649
André Krebber • Mieke Roscher
Editors
Animal Biography
Re-framing Animal Lives
Editors
André Krebber Mieke Roscher
University of Kassel University of Kassel
Kassel, Germany Kassel, Germany
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

ISBN 978-3-319-98287-8 ISBN 978-3-319-98288-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98288-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957697
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover credit: Details/parts of painting “Ocean Being”, by Zhong Hao Chen (2008), oil on
canvas and panel, copyright and owned by the artist
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Gorilla Biscuits
Acknowledgments
The contributions in this volume were selected and adapted from a

conference on animal biographies at the University of Kassel in 2016 that
was generously funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). We
would like to thank the students from the history department at Kassel
University who supported us throughout the conference: Johanna Wurz,
Marc Liebke, Nora Fährmann, Basti Skutta, Tanita Schmidt, and Julian
Herlitze. In addition, we would like to thank Basti Skutta for his careful
support in preparing the manuscript for publication.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: Biographies, Animals and Individuality 1

André Krebber and Mieke Roscher
Part I Explorations 17
2 Living, Biting Monitors, a Morose Howler and Other

Infamous Animals: Animal Biographies in Ethology and
Zoo Biology 19
Matthew Chrulew
3 Finding a Man and his Horse in the Archive? 41

Hilda Kean
4 Recovering and Reconstructing Animal Selves in Literary

Autozoographies 57
Frederike Middelhoff
Part II Reflections 81
5 A Dog’s Life: The Challenges and Possibilities of Animal

Biography 83
Aaron Skabelund
ix
x Contents
6 “We Know Them All”: Does It Make Sense to Create a

Collective Biography of the European Bison? 103
Markus Krzoska
7 Animal Life Stories; or, the Making of Animal Subjects

in Primatological Narratives of Fieldwork 119
Mira Shah
Part III Constructions 139
8 Taxidermy’s Literary Biographies 141

Susan McHugh
9 Caesar: The Rise and Dawn of a Humanimalistic Identity 161

Daniel Wolf
10 Postscript, Posthuman: Werner Herzog’s “Crocodile” at

the End of the World 185
Dominic O’Key
Part IV Experiments 205
11 The Elephant’s I: Looking for Abu’l Abbas 207

Radhika Subramaniam
12 Topsy: The Elephant We Must Never Forget 227

Kim Stallwood
13 Online Animal (Auto-)Biographies: What Does It Mean

When We “Give Animals a Voice?” 243
Margo DeMello
Index 261
Notes on Contributors
Matthew Chrulew is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Culture

and Technology at Curtin University. He is the editor, with Dinesh
Wadiwel, of Foucault and Animals (Brill, 2016), with Deborah Bird Rose
and Thom van Dooren, of Extinction Studies (Columbia, 2017), and, with
Brett Buchanan and Jeffrey Bussolini, of three special issues of Angelaki on
philosophical ethology.
Margo DeMello, Ph.D. is an adjunct faculty member in the Anthrozoology
Master’s Program at Canisius College, the program director for Human-
Animal Studies at the Animals & Society Institute, and has written widely
in the area of human-animal studies.
Hilda Kean is a visiting professor at the University of Greenwich and a
senior honorary research fellow at University College London. As a cul-
tural and public historian she also works on animal-human history. Her
many books include Animal Rights. Political and Social Change in Britain
since 1800 (2000) and The Great Cat and Dog Massacre, University of
Chicago Press (2017–2018). She is jointly editing The Routledge Handbook
for Animal–Human History with Philip Howell, forthcoming in 2018.
André Krebber is Lecturer in History and Theory of Human-Animal
Relations at Kassel University. He researches and teaches in the areas of
human-animal studies, intellectual history, and critical theory. His current
project explores natural beauty as a noninstrumental category of cog-
nition in nineteenth-century philosophy and science.
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Markus Krzoska is Lecturer in History at Justus-Liebig-University

Giessen and University Siegen, Germany. He obtained his doctorate at
Berlin Free University in 2001 and did his habilitation at Giessen in 2012.
He studied history and political science at Mainz University.
Susan McHugh is Professor of English at the University of New England,
USA, and the author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines
(2011) and Dog (2004). She co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Human-
Animal Studies (2014) and Literary Animals Look (2013), as well as a spe-
cial issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.
Frederike Middelhoff is a literary scholar at the University of Würzburg,
Germany, with a special interest in the history and poetics of knowledge. She
is finishing her PhD thesis Literary Autozoographies—Narrating Animal
Life from a First-Person Perspective in German Literature (1787–1922).
Dominic O’Key is a doctoral researcher and teaching assistant at the
University of Leeds. His research explores the concept of the creaturely in
novels by W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee, and Mahasweta Devi.
Mieke Roscher is Assistant Professor for the History of Human-Animal
Relations at the University of Kassel. Her academic interests center on
colonial and gender history as well as animal historiography. Her current
project is on writing the history of animals in the Third Reich.
Mira Shah is a comparatist and cultural studies scholar by training and is
working on a PhD thesis on “Ape and Affect. The Rhetoric of Primatology”
at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
Aaron Skabelund is an associate professor in the Department of History
at Brigham Young University, USA, and the author of Dogs of Empire:
Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World (Cornell
UP, 2011) and “Dogs at War: Military Dogs in Film” in Cinematic
Canines: Dogs and their Work in the Fiction Film (Rutgers UP, 2014).
Kim Stallwood is a vegan animal rights advocate who is an independent
author, consultant, and scholar. He co-founded the Animals and Society
Institute in 2005 and was the volunteer Executive Director of Minding
Animals International (2011–2017). He is the author of Growl: Life Lessons,
Hard Truths, and Bold Strategies from an Animal Advocate (2014).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Radhika Subramaniam is a curator, editor, and writer interested in

urban crises and surprises, particularly crowds, cultures of catastrophe, and
human-animal relationships. She is an associate professor of visual culture
at Parsons School of Design/The New School where she was the first
Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center from
2009 to 2017.
Daniel Wolf is working on his dissertation about the relevance of pictures
for animal-human relations at the University of Kassel. He studied philoso-
phy and sociology, and holds a master’s degree in history and theory of art.
List of Figures
Fig. 5.1 An undated photograph of Hachikō likely lying on the ground

near Shibuya Station (used with permission of Hayashi
Masaharu)84
Fig. 5.2 Photograph of the stuffed Hachikō in the National Science
Museum in Ueno Park, Tokyo. Notice the Pochi Club tag
hanging from his harness. Hayashi Masaharu, ed. Hachikō
bunken shū (Tokyo: Hayashi Masaharu, 1991, used with
permission of the author) 92
Fig. 5.3 Hachikō next to his bronze statue near Shibuya Station,
probably on the day of its dedication, 21 April 1934. On the
side of the photograph someone, perhaps Kobayashi
Kikuzaburō, the Ueno family’s gardener to whom this photo
once belonged, has written, “A bashful (?) Hachikō looking
up at the statue of himself.” Hayashi Masaharu, ed. Hachikō
bunken shū (Tokyo: Hayashi Masaharu, 1991, used with
permission of the author), 252 95
Fig. 9.1 The Road to the Planet of the Apes. © swolf,
schwarzerwolfweisserwolf.com 2016 162
Fig. 9.2 Caesar, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 00:62:19. © swolf,
Fig. 9.3 Motion-capture—Andy Serkis/Caesar at the veterinarian, Rise
of the Planet of the Apes, 00:19:42. © swolf,
Fig. 9.4 Caesar recognizing his leash, Rise of the Planet of the Apes,
00:24:58. © swolf, schwarzerwolfweisserwolf.com 2016 169
xv
xvi List of Figures
Fig. 9.5 Window and Caesar creating the symbol for home/freedom,
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 00:30:30 and 00:41:12. © swolf,
Fig. 9.6 Ape history, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, 00:08:41. © swolf,
Fig. 9.7 Koba, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 00:46:15. © swolf,
Fig. 10.1 Albino alligator. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, dir. Werner
Herzog (2010). © Picturehouse Entertainment / Trafalgar
Releasing. Reproduced under fair dealing 196
Fig. 10.2 Albino alligator close-up. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, dir.
Werner Herzog (2010). © Picturehouse Entertainment /
Trafalgar Releasing. Reproduced under fair dealing 196
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Biographies, Animals

and Individuality
André Krebber and Mieke Roscher
To observe dogs, say, in a park, interact with their kin, including their
human kin, is a curious thing. We are not talking about the distant, dissect-
ing, deterministic kind of observation here, but the kind that suspends
rational correction and attempts to lose itself in its object. In these moments,
it seems almost inescapable to recognize within their play individual person-
alities, tastes, characters and forms of waywardness. Yet, taking animals seri-
ously as individuals, and even more, attempting to substantiate and portray
such individuality in scholarly terms, proves a daunting exercise. As one
approach, scholars have turned to reconstructing and shining light on ani-
mal biographies.1 The biography seems an obvious choice for the challenge.
While history is dominated by attempts that try to standardize, de-individ-
ualize and automatize the behavior of animals, it also proves to be littered
with records of the exceptional lives of unusual animals. Far from being just
1
For example, Baratay, Biographies animales; DeMello, Speaking; McHugh, Animal
Stories; Kean, “Balto”; Pycior, “First Dog”; Witz, “Making”; Fudge, “Animal Lives.”
A. Krebber (*) • M. Roscher

University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany
© The Author(s) 2018 1

A. Krebber, M. Roscher (eds.), Animal Biography,
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98288-5_1
2 A. KREBBER AND M. ROSCHER
a (post)modern sentimental interest, individual animal lives, both real and

fantastic, seem to have captivated the human imagination for a long time.
Examples reach from Bucephalus, antiquity’s enduringly famous horse of
Alexander the Great,2 to Greyfriars Bobby3 and William Bingley’s four-vol-
ume Animal Biography, or, Popular Zoology; Illustrated by Authentic
Anecdotes of the Economy, Habits of Life, Instincts, and Sagacity of the Animal
Creation4 in more recent times. A biography, it is hoped, projects, almost
by definition, the possession of emotions, personhood—a self. Moreover,
the personal element of the biography proves popular and promises to tie a
knot between the biography’s subject and its reader.
Hence, biographical writing surfaces both as an approach to capture
the individuality of animals as well as make animals visible as individuals.
Animal biographies are not meant to say—as one can hear the critics of
such scholarship chuckle—that animals themselves would experience or
even construct their lives in (auto)biographical terms. On the contrary,
animal biography entails exactly the attempt to account for their individu-
ality without having to read their minds, reconstruct their feelings or infer
their intentions. As such, animal biographies remain external to the cogni-
tive experience of the animals’ worlds and their relations to it. Rather, the
animal biography responds to and tries to capture our experience of other
animals as individuals, with their own personalities, idiosyncrasies and each
and every one with a self of its own, as well as our desire to lend voice and
recognition to these individual creatures. We understand this enterprise as
an attempt to make animal subjects visible as each possessing individual
traits of their own. It is an attempt to study and show cultural and local
characteristics of both groups of animals and certain individuals within
those groups, with the hope of breaking the mold of identity that lumps
together all animals as principally the same. Finally, the writing of animal
biography also points to the intimate interlacing of the lives of animals and
humans. With this volume, we want to explore the practicalities of refram-
ing animal lives through the biography, but also to evaluate the biography
as theoretical frame for animal lives.
Winkes, “Boukephalas.”
2
Kean, “Exploration.”
3
4
Bingley, Animal Biography (first published in 1802 in 3 volumes, noteworthy as: Animal
Biography; or, Authentic Anecdotes of the Lives, Manners and Economy of the Animal Creation,
Arranged According to the System of Linnaeus).
INTRODUCTION: BIOGRAPHIES, ANIMALS AND INDIVIDUALITY 3
(Animal) Biography: A Historical Synopsis

Coming from the Greek words of bios for life and graphein for writing,
biography has a long tradition. For historians, the method of biography
has been a longstanding tool in recounting the past. By way of exemplify-
ing a life history, one hoped also to reconstruct the historical possibilities
of one person’s life in the past. Studying a human life in its entirety by
considering the historical context and the interdependencies between the
individual and society can therefore rightly be termed one of the master
narratives in historiography. Looking as far back as antiquity, one cannot
fail to notice that recounting the life of so-called great men is the most
dominant and maybe one of the oldest forms of literary as well as historical
narration. Over the centuries it has remained a widely used practice for
recounting and interpreting historical processes. As such, it was not always
clear what the genre of biography entails, as it was flexible enough to con-
tain encyclopedic accounts, lyrical verses and memoirs. It was usually
defined by its chronological narration, its sequencing and the presentation
of important occurrences in the life presented. However, the literary tradi-
tion of biography from its beginning strayed from these rather rigid speci-
fications, which led to a distinction between an esthetic and a scholarly
biographical genre.5 That these differences have become significantly
blurred following Hayden White’s critique of the distinction between facts
and fiction has also impacted on the genre of biography.6
Biographical research may be much younger than biography itself, but
here also there has been a considerable amount of disagreement on what
the term implies. The research, depending on which discipline is consulted,
was challenged and rejuvenated especially by advances in oral history and
narration, as well as in women’s and gender studies.7 The sole focus on the
so-called great man as the presumed only agent influencing the course of
history has been called into question by these new perspectives. The “note-
worthiness” of the biographical subject has been significantly altered, if not
abolished, especially with the advent of the biographical method in sociol-
ogy. Even if not explicitly addressed however, this “noteworthiness” is the
central factor for why early attempts at animal biographies have been dis-
missed as banal or profane. Some say that the general denunciation of
5
Zymner, “Biographie.”
6
White, Tropics.
7
Ferres, “Gender.”
biography as a suitable tool was based on the assumption that all lives are
inherently constructed. Likewise, the construction of certain lives as privi-
leged over others has led to some historians questioning the suitability of
biography as a tool for recreating the past in general.8 More to the point,
however, is the fact that the influence of the social sciences, especially in the
1970s, and the linguistic turn have together had an immense effect on
biographical research, also with regard to the innate interdisciplinary char-
acter of the biographical genre.9 Thus, what formerly had been character-
ized and described as a constant shift between the focus on the individual
or on society was now being reread as a way of drawing attention to the
abilities of the individual and the individual’s agency.10 The acting subject,
his or her practices and dynamic interaction with the surroundings were to
become central for the idea of the individual’s “making” of his or her biog-
raphy. The question of animal agency can therefore be regarded as being
closely linked to the question of animal biography without however being
identical. In addition, biographical research has reacted to transformations
in society. Historians have therefore taken to micro-historical approaches
and the history of everyday life in their attempts to retell individual biog-
raphies, whereas the method of collective biography has been applied in
ways that include social, political and structural historical dimensions.
Additionally, and in the wake of new historicism and new criticism, the nar-
rative structures of the biography as, for example, marked by its chrono-
logical sequencing have been questioned. Special emphasis is increasingly
being placed on the narrative construction of both text and identities, but
also the tension, interrelation and incongruence between individual and
socio-historical context. Chronological approaches are giving way to the-
matic structures, closed unified images are surrendered for fragmentary
sketches, and the interference of the representational means and forms of
scholarly biographical accounts with the apprehension of the biographical
subjects are taken into consideration.11 Pierre Bourdieu’s remarks on the
“illusion of biography,” which famously questioned the sense of trying to
recreate a life without taking recourse to its many defining relations and
structures by comparing it to a subway map,12 serves here as a reminder,
8
See, for example, Gradmann, “Geschichte.”
9
For an overview see Hamilton, Biography.
10
See also Baratay, Biographies animales, 13–20.
11
Klein and Schnicke, “20. Jahrhundert,” 264.
12
Bourdieu, “L’illusion biographique.”
that the nature of biography is still to be regarded as undetermined. The

question is whether this serves as an invitation to or a warning against try-
ing to incorporate animals into these biographical frameworks.
Methodological Layouts
As such, animal biographies, like biographies in general, ultimately remain
constructions that attempt to trace a more or less coherent image of the life
of an individual, as Bourdieu pointed out. Within this framework, biographies
come in a variety of shapes and forms. This might be truer for nonhuman
animals still, who themselves most likely do not care much for casting their
lives in terms of biographies. Biographies can be smooth and uneventful, but
they can also be broken, fractured, fragmented and fragile. They can be col-
lective and shared, yet they can also be deeply individual and isolated, distinct
from any other biography. For some individuals or even groups of individuals,
biographies can be comprehensively recoverable, but they can also be partial,
interrupted and sketchy. As a consequence, within biographical writing, the
real and the fictional always and necessarily pervade each other.13 It is the task
of the biographer to organize the remnants into a coherent story; it is he or
she who creates meaning through the organization of fragments and sources.
This, of course, is not peculiar to animal biographies, but rather the standard
mode of operation for historians and literary scholars alike.
Following from these thoughts, one of the most challenging method-
ological problems of biographies, regardless of whether their subjects are
animals or humans, remains the question of what constitutes an individual
life and whether it is the individual life at all that is to be the focus of a
biography, as some definitions still hold.14 This stands in contrast to the
many attempts at biographies that use the individual’s life to offer a narra-
tive background for illustrating specific socio-spatial contexts, or that are
interested in a whole social group, which they try to capture by using the
sum of the fragments provided by individual biographies.15 These attempts
have found their application in the writing of collective biographies, in
which a group or a network is being portrayed by a comparative analysis
of their lives. Prosography, as this approach is also called, is defined as the
investigation of the common characteristics of an historical group, whose
13
Pycior, “Public and Private,” 177–178.
14
See, for example, Hornung, “Anthropology.”
15
Schnicke, “Begriffsgeschichte.”
individual biographies may be largely untraceable.16 Methodologically,

these approaches rely on the collection of large data sets, including key
information such as education, place of birth, profession of parents and so
forth, which are then read against the backdrop of historical develop-
ments. Lately, attention also has been directed at the encounter between
humans and animals as a heuristic tool.17 The question, to which this vol-
ume hopes to provide some answers, remains whether or not such meth-
ods are applicable to animals—or whether they can and maybe even must
be enriched, for example, by ethological and ethnological approaches.
Using collective biographies in the traditional human-centered way is also
seen as a way to create situated subjectivities. Thus, by turning to telling
and reframing animal lives through the method of biography, we also hope
to remake animal identities.
More than the writing of human biographies, the writing of animal biog-
raphies then relies fundamentally on interdisciplinary efforts. Even though
animals are present throughout the array of cultural documents and arti-
facts, at least within the last two or three centuries a lot of knowledge about
animals has been collected within the natural sciences. So while there is
much information available about animals and their lives, the task now, as
has been argued by Erica Fudge among others,18 is to submit this knowl-
edge to new and critical analyses in order to perceive animals in new lights.
This requires recalibrating the pairing of methods and sources by crossing
disciplinary boundaries on both levels. As a consequence, the writing of
animal biographies should remain open, in our view, to a wide range of data
and sources. However, because we see this volume as an introduction to
animal biography as a methodological as well as theoretical approach, we
want to limit these methodological attempts and place them within the
framework of a humanities scholarship. Hence, this volume focuses on
reframing the animal biography in historical, cultural and literary studies.
Theoretical Promises
Narrowing in on the biography, this volume is not about animal auto-
biographies. We are neither focusing on the self-expression of the animal,
nor, as suggested earlier, do we turn to the animal biography as a way of
16
See, for example, Booth, How to Make it.
17
Davies and Gannon, “Collective Biography.”
18
Fudge, “Animal Lives.”
rendering the animal’s mind, thoughts and way of experiencing into

speech, as DeMello does with her fine collection of essays Speaking for
Animals.19 Instead, we are interested in evaluating the constructing of
animal biographies as a way of making visible and honoring animals as
individuals externally, from historical sources, lived experiences, the bodies
of animals. The two perspectives are closely related, of course, in that they
share a desire to honor, capture and make noticeable the animal as an
agent, who is individually self-determined, at least to some degree, and in
taking seriously the parts animals play in society; likewise the two perspec-
tives are not mutually exclusive (F. Middelhoff’s and M. DeMello’s con-
tributions to this volume make this obvious). But whereas the autobiography
approaches animal agency by trying to bring to light the self-experience of
an animal other, the biography attempts to reveal agency through external
markers and through the intertwinement with others and the historical,
socio-cultural context. Through the biography, individuals and suppressed
groups hence become visible as social, rather than cognitive actors.20
Yet, while biography and the individual are inseparably intertwined,
they far from simply and unequivocally conform to each other. When the
biographers of the nineteenth century approached their protagonists as
personifications of the socio-political conditions of their time, both study-
ing and writing history through the lives of a few powerful men, they
tended to overwrite the individuality of their protagonists and identify
them with the social realities of their times. As such, these biographies,
while apparently making the life of one individual their principal material,
really proved de-individualizing—even if it was not to the detriment of the
perceived individual grandeur of their subjects. Thus simultaneously de-
and hyper-individualizing, biography’s relationship with the individual
appears deeply ambiguous. The critique that formed against such bio-
graphical privileging and elevation of a few over the many during the first
half of the twentieth century, in turn, did not necessarily elevate the indi-
vidual more broadly through acknowledgment of a more widespread biog-
raphy-worthiness of the individual as such. Rather, its main thrust was
directed at the identification of the actions of some individuals with history
itself that extended to these individuals near total stature over the course
of societies by reducing everyone else to mere extras on the set of a 1960s
epic film. More than on individuals, the door to democratization of the
19
DeMello, “Introduction.”
20
Cf. Klein and Schnicke, “20. Jahrhundert,” 259.
biography recoiled exemplarily, if opening on the individual nevertheless

potentially thereby as well. The demolition of the nineteenth century
biography then lent voice to the suffering of repressed groups—people of
color, women, workers—while also highlighting the individual’s fragility
and fragmentation by emphasizing the limitation of its power. Thus, the
relationship between biography and individual is precarious. As a conse-
quence, the studying of biography today has moved away from the idea of
a coherent narrative while also always reflecting upon the process of medi-
ation that is inherent to the narration and production of the biography
(and, indeed, all knowledge).
It is precisely this theoretical insight, however, that not only makes the
biography a possible approach to the consideration of other lives, but
places it as a competent voice within the conundrum of how one might be
able to speak about and represent the individual experience of the other.
One of the major critiques of a social and cultural reevaluation of animals
that intends to recognize animals as autonomous, self-acting individuals is
the anthropocentrism that is argued to be inherent in their every represen-
tation.21 In the tension between the biographer on the one hand and the
particular object of a biography on the other—that is, the challenge of
reproducing and invoking the life and experiences of another individual
subject—the biography as a scholarly genre has always been imbued with
the same epistemological challenge, only in relation to other humans.
Indeed, it is the mainstay of the biography to give form to the other. As
such, the biographed is always also the product of the biographer, while
the perspective of biographer and biographed cannot be neatly separated.
Reframing animal lives through a biographical lens thus does not by itself
lead to the envisioned emancipation of their protagonists by way of their
individualization. Yet the alternative to a crude scientific objectivism that
the biography represents, including its receptiveness to the anecdotal, its
transgression of the delimitation between science and art, and the space it
leaves for differentiation and deviance, holds specific promises for human-
animal studies. Lurking ephemerally between the lines of the discursive
aether of human-animal studies, the individuality of the animal breaks to
the surface in spontaneous eruptions, before descending back into the
ineffable. Biography might provide a footing for these notions of a life
peculiar to animals and help to give it form. That Virginia Woolf, who
21
On the last point, see, for example, the discussion of anthropocentrism in Prade,
Sprachoffenheit, 35–43.
famously democratized the biography by claiming that “anyone who has

lived a life, and left a record of that life, [is] worthy of a biography,”22
chose to write a biography on behalf of an animal, thence seems little
surprising.23
Needless to say, that significant theoretical and methodological ques-
tions remain. Is the focus on a few pronounced animal personalities (or
even a few specific collectives of animals) not just shifting the perimeter of
the collective, without any potential for moving beyond the anthropocen-
trism in our relation to animals? What about the vast number of individual
animals who do not leave distinguished marks? Do they not become even
more invisible than before? Can collective biographies compensate for
such limitations? In allusion to Bourdieu, we might also ask if the concept
of biography is at all useful for the recovering of individuality. Additionally,
if we consider the concept of the biography limiting for humans, is the
construction of animal biographies not counterproductive, especially if we
want to honor the individuality and agency of animals? Do individuals
even have biographies in the first place—or, coming from the opposite
direction, is the construction of a biography a necessary precondition for
subjectivity? And do animals in particular have biographies, or is their
experience instead rather momentary, and the writing of animal biogra-
phies therefore entirely an anthropomorphic and anthropocentric con-
struction? Would this extend to all species? Or are biographies peculiar to
human, and maybe just a few other nonhuman species? The purpose of
this volume is to pursue and think through some of these challenges.
For our opening part, titled “Explorations,” we choose to trace the
appearance of animal biography back to biographical, not historical, inter-
species beginnings. Whether by studying the lives of animal ethologists and
biologists and their passion for studying animals, by looking for animals in
archival material and finding an intimate relationship between a man and a
horse, or by questioning whether a fictional animal is based on a real life
animal in contact to the text’s author, animal biographies are discovered
and explored through interlinkages with human caretakers, riders, keepers,
feeders, admirers, observers. These explorations may be the result of a
well-designed research program or a mere coincidental stumbling over a
life influencing other lives. Matthew Chrulew’s attempt to frame animal
biographies is placed at the intersection of these poles. By sketching out
22
Woolf, “Art of Biography,” 226–227.
23
Woolf, Flush.
how “charismatic or confounding creatures shape the life of the animal

scientist, affect their interests and ideas, impel a drive to biological knowl-
edge, [and] compel the writing of animal lives,” he not only shows how
biographies of scientists have been imprinted by the animals they encoun-
ter, but how animal biographies lie at the center of their descriptive frame-
work. Using the narrative evidence of the scientist’s encounters, especially
those of the Swiss zoologist Heini Hediger and curator-emeritus of the
Bronx zoo, Lee Crandall, as a source, he traces back the historical apprecia-
tion of animals as biographical subjects in the work of historian Eric Baratay
and philosophical ethologist Dominique Lestel. Upon closer examination,
autobiography, animal biography and zoo-biography become, as Chrulew
argues, interwoven, opening up the chance to follow not only the famous
but the common animals into their dens, cages and enclosures. In her take
on working as an animal historian in the archive, Hilda Kean shows that it
is not only scientists’ accounts through which these biographical glimpses
can be retrieved. Although exploration is a routine endeavor of any archival
work, it is unexpected discoveries while “filling gaps” in a story that lead to
encounters with unexpected individuals. Arguing that these glimpses may
be just part of a larger picture, she exemplifies how the relational and often
emotional connections between humans and animals can provide a starting
point for a biographical account that represents at least that side of an ani-
mal’s existence that is shared with human beings. Frederike Middelhoff, in
her chapter on literary autozoographies, questions the aim of finding an
“actual,” metaphorical meaning behind an animal’s narrative voice. Instead
proposing to utilize species-specific and indeed zoological readings when
approaching and studying such texts, she highlights the role literature can
play in coming to terms with the epistemological, cultural, socio-historical
and esthetic complexities that animal selves present. Taking the German
Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffman and his novel The Life and Opinions of
the Tomcat Murr as an example, she suggests that animal traces within
these texts need to be explored by taking apart the all too obvious relation-
ship between narrator and author, and evaluating the empirical founda-
tions of the text in search for the autobiographical selves.
The volume’s second part turns to “Reflections” on the biography as
an opening for a deeper conversation with socio-political as well as cul-
tural contexts. Here, animal biographies serve as an entry point for pro-
viding a narration that goes far beyond the individual’s life story, even if
the individual life remains a focal point. The animal biographies in this
section point beyond a narrow biological confinement to an interspecies
social meta-level, without, however, depriving the protagonists of their

individuality or making the animals disappear altogether. This holds true
particularly for those animal individuals of whom a wide array of source
material, including taxidermic evidence, is available. Reflecting upon what
is, can and should be told beyond the limitation of reconstructing a life is
at the heart of these chapters, which also entails reflecting on methodolo-
gies. Whether it is the contextual embedment within national or even
nationalistic master narratives or the perceiving of primatologists’ obser-
vations, they show how animal biographies might surpass the narration of
the biological individual. Hachikō , the Akita dog of international fame
and main character in Aaron Skabelund’s contribution, makes this par-
ticularly obvious. Skabelund reflects on the challenges and possibilities of
composing animal biographies, addressing especially the “subalternity” of
animals as biographical agents, and intertwines these with questions of
materiality (not only of the animal body but also of the source evidence
that he relies upon) and temporality. Biographical discourses change after
the death of the biographical subject and while this might be true also for
humans, the culture of remembering animals seems to leave more room
for instrumentalization, as Skabelund points out. He thus shows how the
representation of the animal is highly adaptable to nationalistic idealiza-
tion, and what can be gained by disentangling the individual life from the
political agenda as well as by taking into account matters of breed.
Breeding also takes center stage in Markus Krzsoka’s evaluation of animals
who are presumed “wild”: in this case the European Bison, a species
driven to near extinction at the turn of the twentieth century. Having a
whole group of animals as object of a biographical account, the article
reflects the possibility of writing a collective biography of the species based
on the yearly pedigree book for all living specimens and their descendants.
Krzoska asks whether these collective identities translate back into the
possibility of tracing individuality, or not. Similar questions are raised in
Mira Shah’s chapter. While asserting that traditionally, scientific accounts
of animals have worked toward an obscuring of individuality, she deduces
that by reflecting on the popular scientific by-products of ethological
fieldwork, in her case the biographies of primatologists, one cannot fail to
note that it is individual animals that are being followed, observed, docu-
mented and described, sometimes for years, decades, even whole lives.
She therefore suggests that autobiographical narratives and “research
memoirs” of primatological fieldwork create textual animal subjects that
endow the animals with literary agency. Reflecting both on the practice of
primatological fieldwork as well as on the narrative structures of the texts,

she stresses that subjectivity is created via animal biography.
Part III takes a look at what we have dubbed “Constructions” of ani-
mal biographies. Bearing in mind that all biographies are the result of an
assemblage, an agglomeration and ordering of data, text, information,
material and immaterial evidence, the means of construction—concretely,
taxidermy and film—are discussed here. The production of certain biog-
raphies in visual media particularly and their ubiquity in popular culture
generates icons that often seem to stand in for whole species and stereo-
typed animal-human relationships. A closer observation reveals, however,
that this prioritization must not be the case, and that the construction of
animals and their biographies instead comes in forms that bridge rather
than conceal the difference between the whole and the individual. The
interest in determining whether individuality is a precondition for con-
structing the historical subject lies behind Susan McHugh’s reflection on
the intersection of taxidermy and literary representations. The challenge
for McHugh is that taxidermic displays adhere to a collective narrative of
both the object itself and of its provenance. In a way similar to the case
of Hachikō , the life after death inherent in the taxidermic display makes
for a history different from the exhibit’s previous life. McHugh therefore
suggests a genealogical reading of both literary representations and his-
torical accounts, in order to disentangle the constructions of life, death
and afterlife, past, present and future as well as culture and biology. Using
contemporary fiction about taxidermy and taxidermists as sources along-
side taxidermied animals, she moreover reflects on animal biography as
an esthetic formation. Esthetics come also into play in Daniel Wolf ’s
dissection of the post-human dystopia represented by the rebooted

Planet of the Apes franchise, and its main characters Caesar and Koba,
apparently prime examples of animal biographies. Taking Deleuze and
Guattari’s as well as Haraway’s concepts of becoming as foundation, this
chapter describes the evolutionary process of constructing identities that
are regarded as human or nonhuman. Surprisingly, the concepts of
human and nonhuman are seldom interwoven despite the apes’ anthro-
pomorphized description. Wolf ’s detailed analysis of claims of anthropo-
morphism therefore asks for a disentanglement of categories of similarity
and the construction of identities. An equally post-human perspective is
presented in Dominic O’Key’s chapter on the crocodile in the postscript
to Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams from
2010. Herzog presents, in O’Key’s reading, a speculative biography of
animals depicted in the Chauvet cave in France who, in a postscript, are
supposed to have outlived the human race. This framing of time then
becomes one of the central questions in the construction of a biography.
Drawing from George Bataille, Jacques Derrida and Bernhard Stiegler,
O’Key suggests that matters of birth and death, beginning and collapse,
technology and time create strange temporalities that impact upon the
possibilities of writing biographies. Furthermore, the opening up of
spaces by decentering the anthropos while creating a post-human con-
text—a context, however, that is still inscribed by former human pres-
ences—to some extend confirms the ontological separation between
humans and animals. By presenting a biography of the albino crocodiles
of the cave, O’Key illustrates how, in their constructedness, animals are
“always irrevocably marked” and simultaneously “mutated.”
The final part of the volume offers “Experiments” in potential form,
narration and embodied constitution of animal biographies. The three
chapters address, each in their own way, the underlying human relation-
ships that inform the presentation of biographies, through experimental
fieldwork, concerns for animal rights, and the creating of profiles for one’s
beloved animal companion. Moreover, these chapters also show how cre-
ative writing processes and social media help to create particular forms of
animal biographies that might trigger animal activism and concerns for
animal well-being, historical interest as well as the literary imagination. By
way of textual fragmentation, Radhika Subramaniam presents the animal,
his human companion and the writer/researcher as three coordinates in
the construction of the story, and the animal biography as result of their
story-telling. Following the tracks and traces of the elephant Abu’l Abbas
and his mahout from the court of the Caliph of Baghdad, Harun al Rashid,
to Aachen, Germany, where he was given to Charlemagne, Subramaniam
constructs a credible tale of this elephant’s travels through considering the
intertwined experiences of intimacy, isolation, confinement, migration and
intelligibility, while also addressing the challenges of telling stories across
species and time. By introducing human characters who accompany the
elephant, she creates a “plausible fiction” that also questions the linearity of
biographical projects and disassembles the composition of movement and
time in an attempt to listen for and hear Abu’l Abbas’ calls, the “elephant-
like tricks that can travel over distances,” both temporal and spatial, as one
might add. An elephant also takes center stage in the account of Topsy
presented in the following biographical eulogy by Kim Stallwood. Putting
the life and (deplorable) death of Topsy in the framework of the building
of the American industrial and entertainment empire, but also the history
of zoos and circuses, this chapter calls for an empathic and compassionate
reading of all sources available, moreover thickened by contemporary

accounts on elephant behavior. The granting of rights to animals should
thus include the right to a biographical narration that accepts the claim that
animals are subjects, at the very least, of their lives. As such, Stallwood
points out, writing animal biographies can help to give back to animals
some of the autonomy they routinely are denied in a human-centered
world. Margo DeMello, finally, takes up Stallwood’s cue in her look at the
creation of animal biographies on social media platforms like Twitter,
Facebook and Instagram, as well as specialized animal sites, such as Catster,
Dogster or Bunspace. Online animals, as DeMello shows, serve as more
than the voice of a human writer who constructs fictional accounts of their
pet(s), but can also be used to promote better treatment of animals beyond
the digital sphere. While the very nature of online animal biographies may
be anthropomorphic, DeMello argues, they may also create precedents for
a new understanding of animal subjectivity and identity.
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PART I
Explorations
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corn, whose cargoes were paid for out of funds provided partly by
the charity of the people of England, and partly by a parliamentary
grant which passed when Massena retreated.
In this crisis the British cabinet granted an additional subsidy to
Portugal, but from the scarcity of specie, the greatest part of it was
paid in kind, and the distress of the regency for money was scarcely
lessened; for these supplies merely stood in the place of the plunder
which had hitherto prevailed in the country. Thus Mr. Canning’s
prodigality, Mr. Vansittart’s paper system, and Mr. Perceval’s
economy, all combined to press upon the British general, and to use
his own words, he was supplied with only one-sixth part of the
money necessary to keep the great machine going which had been
set in motion. Mr. Perceval however, in answer to his remonstrances,
employed a secretary of the Treasury to prove in a laboured paper,
founded entirely upon false data, that the army had been over-
supplied, and must have money to spare. But that minister, whose
speeches breathed nothing but the final destruction of France,
designed to confine the efforts of England to the defence of Portugal
alone, without any regard to the rest of the Peninsula.
Amongst the other follies of the Portuguese regency was a
resolution to issue proclamations, filled with bombastic adulation of
themselves, vulgar abuse of the French, and altogether unsuited to
the object of raising the public feeling, which flagged under their
system. To the English general’s remonstrances on this head, Forjas
replied, that praise of themselves and abuse of the French, was the
national custom, and could not be dispensed with! a circumstance
which certain English writers who have implicitly followed the
accounts of the Portuguese authors, such as Accursio de Neves,
and men of his stamp, relative to French enormities, would do well to
consider. And here it is right to observe, that so many complaints
were made of the cruelty committed by Massena’s army while at
Santarem, that lord Wellington had some thoughts of reprisals; but
having first caused strict inquiry to be made, it was Mr. Stuart’s papers,
discovered that in most cases, the ordenança, after MSS.
having submitted to the French, and received their protection, took
advantage of it to destroy the stragglers and small detachments, and
the cruelty complained of was only the infliction of legitimate
punishment for such conduct: the projected retaliation was therefore
changed for an injunction to the ordenanças to cease from such a
warfare.
The character of the regency was, however, most openly shewn in
their proceedings connected with the convention of Cintra. All the
advantages which that treaty ensured to Portugal, they complacently
reaped, but overlooked or annulled those points in which the
character of England was concerned. In violation of the convention,
and in despite of the remonstrances of lord Wellington and Mr.
Stuart, they cast the French residents at Lisbon into loathsome
dungeons, without any cause of complaint; and in the affair of
Mascarheñas their conduct was distinguished alike by wanton
cruelty and useless treachery. This youth, when only fifteen, had with
many others entered the French service in Junot’s time, under the
permission of his own prince; and he and the Conde de Sabugal,
were taken by the peasantry in 1810 endeavouring to pass from
Massena’s army into Spain, Sabugal in uniform, Mascarheñas in
disguise. They were both tried as traitors. The first, a general officer,
and with powerful friends amongst the Fidalgos, was acquitted, as
indeed was only just; but he was then appointed to a situation under
the regency, which was disgraceful, as arising from faction:
Mascarheñas was a boy, and had no powerful friends, and he was
condemned to death. Lord Wellington and Mr. Stuart represented the
injustice of this sentence, and they desired that if humanity was
unheeded the government would put him to death as a spy, for being
in disguise, and so prevent the danger of reprisals, already
threatened by Massena. The young man’s mother and sisters,
grovelling in the dust, implored the regency to spare him, but to shew
their hatred of lord Wellington and Mr. Stuart, for the disputes with
the regency were then highest, the government told the miserable
women, that it was the British general and minister who demanded
his death, and they were sent, with this brutal falsehood, to weep
and to ask grace from persons who had no power to grant it.
Mascarheñas was publicly executed as a traitor, for entering the
French service under the authority of his native prince, while
Sabugal was acquitted, and even rewarded, although precisely in the
same circumstances, when the excuse of the disguise had been
rejected.
In 1810 one Corea, calling himself an aide-de-camp of Massena,
was likewise seized in disguise within the British lines, and, having
given useful information, was by lord Wellington confined in St.
Julians, to protect him from the Portuguese government. After a time
he became deranged, and was released, whereupon the regency,
rather than keep him, desired that he might be sent as a prisoner of
war to England; thus for convenience admitting the very principle
which they had rejected when only honour and humanity were
concerned. A process against the marquis d’Alorna had also been
commenced, but his family being powerful it was soon dropped, and
yet the government refused madame d’Alorna leave to join her
husband, thus shewing themselves spiteful and contemptible as well
as cowardly and bloody. Even the court of Brazil was shocked. The
prince rebuked the regency severely for the death of Mascarheñas,
reversed the sentences on some others, and banished Sabugal to
Terceira.
This was the political state of Portugal.
Lord Liverpool’s intimation, that neither corn nor specie 1811.
could be had from England, threw lord Wellington on his own May.
resources for feeding his troops. He had before created a paper
money by means of commissariat bills, which, being paid regularly at
certain periods, passed current with the people when the national
bonds called “Apolocies” were at an enormous discount. He now in
concert with Mr. Stuart, entered into commerce to supply his
necessities. For having ascertained that grain in different parts of the
world, especially in South America, could be bought by bills, cheaper
than it sold for hard cash in Lisbon; and that in Egypt, although only
to be bought with specie, it was at a reduced price; they employed
mercantile agents to purchase it for the army account, and after
filling the magazines sold the overplus to the inhabitants. This
transaction was, however, greatly impeded by the disputes with
North America, which were now rapidly hastening to a rupture; the
American ships which frequented the Tagus being prevented by the
non-importation act from bringing back merchandize, were forced to
demand coin, which helped to drain the country of specie.
As Mr. Stuart could obtain no assistance from the English
merchants of Lisbon, to aid him in a traffic which interfered with their
profits, he wrote circular letters to the consuls in the Mediterranean,
and in the Portuguese islands, and to the English minister at
Washington, desiring them to negotiate treasury bills; to increase the
shipments of corn to Lisbon, and pay with new bills, to be invested in
such articles of British manufacture as the non-importation law still
permitted to go to America. By this complicated process he contrived
to keep something in the military chest; and this commerce, which
lord Wellington truly observed, was not what ought to have occupied
his time and attention, saved the army, and the people, when the
proceedings of Mr. Perceval would have destroyed both. Yet it was
afterwards cavilled at and censured by the ministers, on the
representations of the merchants who found their exorbitant gains
interrupted by it.
Pressed by such accumulated difficulties, and not supported in
England as he deserved, the general, who had more than once
intimated his resolution to withdraw from the Peninsula, now
seriously thought of executing it. Yet when he considered, that the
cause was one even of more interest to England than to the
Peninsula; that the embarrassments of the French might be even
greater than his own, and that Napoleon himself, gigantic as his
exertions had been, and were likely to be, was scarcely aware of the
difficulty of conquering the Peninsula while an English army held
Portugal; when he considered also, that light was breaking in the
north of Europe, that the chances of war are many, even in the worst
of times, and above all, when his mental eye caught the beams of
his own coming glory, he quelled his rising indignation, and re-
tempered his mighty energies to bear the buffet of the tempest.
But he could not remove the obstacles that choked his path, nor
could he stand still, lest the ground should open beneath his feet. If
he moved in the north, Marmont’s army and the army under
Bessieres were ready to oppose him, and he must take Ciudad
Rodrigo or blockade it before he could even advance against them.
To take that place required a battering-train, to be brought up
through a mountainous country from Lamego, and there was no
covering position for the army during the siege. To blockade and
pass it, would so weaken his forces, already inferior to the enemy,
that he could do nothing effectual; meanwhile Soult would have
again advanced from Llerena, and perhaps have added Elvas to his
former conquests.
To act on the defensive in Beira, and follow up the blow against
Soult, by invading Andalusia, in concert with the Murcians and the
corps of Blake, Beguines, and Graham, while Joseph’s absence
paralysed the army of the centre; while the army of Portugal was
being reorganized in Castile; and while Suchet was still engaged
with Taragona, would have been an operation suitable to lord
Wellington’s fame and to the circumstances of the moment. But then
Badajos must have been blockaded with a corps powerful enough to
have defied the army of the centre, and the conduct of the
Portuguese government had so reduced the allied forces, that this
would not have left a sufficient army to encounter Soult. Hence, after
the battle of Albuera, the only thing to be done, was to renew the
siege of Badajos, which, besides its local interest, contained the
enemy’s bridge equipage and battering train; but which, on common
military calculations, could scarcely be expected to fall before Soult
and Marmont would succour it: yet it was only by the taking of that
town that Portugal itself could be secured beyond the precincts of
Lisbon, and a base for further operations obtained.
According to the regular rules of art, Soult should have been
driven over the mountains before the siege was begun, but there
was no time to do this, and Marmont was equally to be dreaded on
the other side; wherefore lord Wellington could only try, as it were, to
snatch away the fortress from between them, and he who, knowing
his real situation, censures him for the attempt, is neither a general
nor a statesman. The question was, whether the attempt should be
made or the contest in the Peninsula be resigned. It failed, indeed,
and the Peninsula was not lost, but no argument can be thence
derived, because it was the attempt, rather than the success, which
was necessary to keep the war alive; moreover the French did not
push their advantages as far as they might have done, and the
unforeseen circumstance of a large sum of money being brought to
Lisbon, by private speculation, at the moment of failure, enabled the
English general to support the crisis.
C H A P T E R V.
SECOND ENGLISH SIEGE OF BADAJOS.
There is no operation in war so certain as a modern siege, 1811.

provided the rules of art are strictly followed, but, unlike the May.
ancient sieges in that particular, it is also different in this; that no
operation is less open to irregular daring, because the course of the
engineer can neither be hurried nor delayed without danger. Lord
Wellington knew that a siege of Badajos, in form, required longer
time, and better means, than were at his disposal, but he was forced
to incur danger and loss of reputation, which is loss of strength, or to
adopt some compendious mode of taking that place. The time that
he could command, and time is in all sieges the greatest point, was
precisely that which the French required to bring up a force sufficient
to disturb the operation; and this depended on the movements of the
army of Portugal, whose march from Salamanca to Badajos, by the
pass of Baños, or even through that of Gata, could not be stopped
by general Spencer, because the mouths of those defiles were
commanded by Marmont’s positions. It was possible also at that
season, for an army to pass the Tagus by fords near Alcantara, and
hence more than twenty days of free action against the place were
not to be calculated upon.
Now the carriages of the battering guns used in Beresford’s siege
were so much damaged, that the artillery officers asked eleven days
to repair them; and the scanty means of transport for stores was
much diminished by carrying the wounded from Albuera to the
different hospitals. Thus more than fifteen days of open trenches,
and nine days of fire could not be expected. With good guns,
plentiful stores, and a corps of regular sappers and miners, this time
would probably have sufficed; but none of these things were in the
camp, and it was a keen jest of Picton to say, that “lord Wellington
sued Badajos in forma pauperis.”
The guns, some of them cast in Philip the Second’s reign, were of
soft brass, and false in their bore; the shot were of different sizes,
and the largest too small; the Portuguese gunners were
inexperienced, there were but few British artillery-men, few
engineers, no sappers or miners, and no time to teach the troops of
the line how to make fascines and gabions. Regular and sure
approaches against the body of the place, by the Pardaleras and the
Picurina outworks, could not be attempted; but it was judged that
Beresford’s lines of attack on the castle and Fort Christoval, might be
successfully renewed, avoiding the errors of that general; that is to
say, by pushing the double attacks simultaneously, and with more
powerful means. San Christoval might thus be taken, and batteries
from thence could sweep the interior of the castle, which was
meanwhile to be breached. Something also was hoped from the
inhabitants, and something from the effect of Soult’s retreat after
Albuera.
This determination once taken, every thing was put in motion with
the greatest energy. Major Dickson, an artillery officer whose talents
were very conspicuous during the whole war, had, with unexpected
rapidity, prepared a battering train of thirty twenty-four-pounders, four
sixteen-pounders, and twelve eight and ten-inch howitzers made to
serve as mortars by taking off the wheels and placing them on
trucks. Six iron Portuguese ship-guns were forwarded from
Salvatierra, making altogether fifty-two pieces, a considerable
convoy of engineer’s stores had already arrived from Alcacer do Sal,
and a company of British artillery marched from Lisbon to be mixed
with the Portuguese, making a total of six hundred gunners. The
regular engineer-officers present, were only twenty-one in number;
but eleven volunteers from the line were joined as assistant-
engineers, and a draft of three hundred intelligent men from the line,
including twenty-five artificers of the staff corps, strengthened the
force immediately under their command.
Hamilton’s Portuguese division was already before the town, and
on the 24th of May, at the close of evening, general Houston’s
division, increased to five thousand men, by the addition of the
seventeenth Portuguese regiment, and the Tavira and Lagos militia,
invested San Christoval. The flying bridge was then laid down on the
Guadiana, and on the 27th Picton’s division, arriving from Campo
Mayor, crossed the river, by the ford above the town, and joined
Hamilton, their united force being about ten thousand men. General
Hill commanded the covering army which, including the Spaniards,
was spread from Merida to Albuera. The cavalry was pushed forward
in observation of Soult, and a few days after, intelligence having
arrived that Drouet’s division was on the point of effecting a junction
with that marshal, two regiments of cavalry and two brigades of
infantry, which had been quartered at Coria, as posts of
communication with Spencer, were called up to reinforce the
covering army.
While the allies were engaged at Albuera, Phillipon, the governor
of Badajos, had levelled their trenches, repaired his own damages,
and obtained a small supply of wine and vegetables from the people
of Estremadura, who were still awed by the presence of Soult’s
army; and within the place all was quiet, for the citizens did not now
exceed five thousand souls. He had also mounted more guns, and
when the place was invested, parties of the townsmen mixed with
soldiers, were observed working to improve the defences; wherefore,
as any retrenchments made in the castle, behind the intended points
of attack, would have frustrated the besiegers’ object by prolonging
the siege, lord Wellington had a large telescope placed in the tower
of La Lyppe, near Elvas, by which the interior of the castle could be
plainly looked into, and all preparations discovered.
In the night of the 29th, ground was broken for a false attack
against the Pardaleras, and the following night sixteen hundred
workmen, with a covering party of twelve hundred, sank a parallel
against the castle, on an extent of eleven hundred yards, without
being discovered by the enemy, who did not fire until after daylight.
The same night twelve hundred workmen, covered by eight hundred
men under arms, opened a parallel four hundred and fifty yards from
San Christoval, and seven hundred yards from the bridge-head. On
this line one breaching, and two counter-batteries, were raised
against the fort and against the bridge-head, to prevent a sally from
that point; and a fourth battery was also commenced to search the
defences of the castle, but the workmen were discovered, and a
heavy fire struck down many of them.
On the 31st the attack against the castle, the soil being very soft,
was pushed forward without much interruption, and rapidly; but the
Christoval attack, being carried on in a rocky soil, and the earth
brought up from the rear, proceeded slowly, and with considerable
loss. This day the British artillery company came up on mules from
Estremos, and the engineer hastened the works. The direction of the
parallel against the castle was such, that the right gradually
approached the point of attack by which the heaviest fire of the place
was avoided; yet, so great was the desire to save time, that before
the suitable point of distance was attained, a battery of fourteen
twenty-four-pounders with six large howitzers was marked out.
On the Christoval side, the batteries were not finished 1811.
before the night of the 1st of June, for the soil was so rocky, June.
that the miner was employed to level the ground for the platforms;
and the garrison having mortars of sixteen and eighteen inches’
diameter mounted on the castle, sent every shell amongst the
workmen. These huge missiles would have ruined the batteries on
that side altogether, if the latter had not been on the edge of a ridge,
from whence most of the shells rolled off before bursting, yet so
difficult is it to judge rightly in war, that Phillipon French Register of
stopped this fire, thinking it was thrown away! The the Siege, MSS.
progress of the works was also delayed by the bringing of earth from
a distance, and woolpacks purchased at Elvas, were found to be an
excellent substitute.
In the night of the 2d, the batteries on both sides were completed,
and armed with forty-three pieces of different sizes, of which twenty
were pointed against the castle; the next day the fire of the besiegers
opened, but the windage caused by the smallness of the shot,
rendered it very ineffectual at first, and five pieces became
unserviceable. However, before evening the practice was steadier,
the fire of the fort was nearly silenced, and the covering of masonry
fell from the castle-wall, discovering a perpendicular bank of clay.
In the night of the 3d the parallel against the castle was prolonged,
and a fresh battery for seven guns traced out at six hundred and fifty
yards from the breach. On the 4th the garrison’s fire was increased
by several additional guns, and six more pieces of the besiegers
were disabled, principally by their own fire. Meanwhile the batteries
told but slightly against the bank of clay.
At Christoval, the fort was much injured, and some damage was
done to the castle, from one of the batteries on that side; but the
guns were so soft and bad that the rate of firing was of necessity
greatly reduced in all the batteries. In the night the new battery was
armed, all the damaged works were repaired, and the next day the
enemy having brought a gun in Christoval to plunge into the trenches
on the castle side, the parallel there was deepened and traverses
were constructed to protect the troops.
Fifteen pieces still played against the castle, but the bank of clay,
although falling away in flakes, always remained perpendicular. One
damaged gun was repaired on the Christoval side, but two more had
become unserviceable.
In the night the parallel against the castle was again extended, a
fresh battery was traced out, at only five hundred and twenty yards
from the breach, to receive the Portuguese iron guns, which had
arrived at Elvas; and on the Christoval side some new batteries were
opened and some old ones were abandoned. During this night the
garrison began to entrench themselves behind the castle breach,
before morning their labourers were well covered, and two additional
pieces, from Christoval, were made to plunge into the trenches with
great effect. On the other hand the fire of the besiegers had broken
the clay bank, which took such a slope as to appear nearly
practicable, and the stray shells and shots set fire to the houses
nearest the castle, but three more guns were disabled.
On the 6th there were two breaches in Christoval, and the
principal one being found practicable, a company of grenadiers with
twelve ladders were directed to assault it, while a second company
turned the fort by the east to divert the enemy’s attention. Three
hundred men from the trenches were at the same time pushed
forward by the west side to cut the communication between the fort
and the bridge-head; and a detachment, with a six-pounder, moved
into the valley of the Gebora, to prevent any passage of the
Guadiana by boats.
F I R S T A S S A U LT O F C H R I S TO VA L .
The storming party, commanded by major M‘Intosh, of the 85th

regiment, was preceded by a forlorn hope under Mr. Dyas, of the
51st, and this gallant gentleman, guided by the engineer Forster, a
young man of uncommon bravery, reached the glacis about
midnight, and descended the ditch without being discovered. The
French had, however, cleared all the rubbish away, the breach had
still seven feet of perpendicular wall, many obstacles, such as carts
chained together and pointed beams of wood, were placed above it,
and large shells were ranged along the ramparts to roll down upon
the assailants. The forlorn hope finding the opening impracticable,
was retiring with little loss, when the main body, which had been
exposed to a flank fire, from the town as well as a direct fire from the
fort, came leaping into the ditch with ladders, and another effort was
made to escalade at different points; the ladders were too short, and
the garrison, consisting of only seventy-five men, besides the
cannoneers, made so stout a resistance, and the confusion and
mischief occasioned by the bursting of the shells was so great, that
the assailants again retired with the loss of more than one hundred
men.
Bad success always produces disputes, and the causes of this
failure were attributed by some to the breach being impracticable
from the first; by others to the confusion which arose after the main
body had entered. French writers affirm that the Lamarre’s Sieges.
breach was certainly practicable on the night of the
5th, but repaired on the 6th; that as the besiegers did not attack until
midnight, the workmen had time to clear the ruins away and to raise
fresh obstacles, and the bravery of the soldiers, who were provided
with three muskets each, did the rest. But it is also evident, that
whether from inexperience, accident, or other causes, the
combinations for the assault were not very well calculated; the
storming party was too weak, the ladders few and short, and the
breach not sufficiently scoured by the fire of the batteries. The attack
itself was also irregular and ill-combined, for the leading troops were
certainly repulsed before the main body had descended the ditch.
The intrepidity of the assailants was admitted by all sides, yet it is a
great point in such attacks that the supports should form almost one
body with the leaders, because the sense of power derived from
numbers is a strong incentive to valour, and obstacles which would
be insurmountable to a few, seem to vanish before a multitude. It is
also to be recollected that this was a case where not loss of men, but
time was to be considered.
During this night the iron guns were placed in battery against the
castle, but two more of the brass pieces became unserviceable, and
the following day three others were disabled. However, the bank of
clay at the castle at last offered a practicable slope, and during the
night captain Patton of the engineers examined it closely; he was
mortally wounded in returning, yet lived to make his report that it was
practicable. Nevertheless the garrison continued, as they had done
every night at both breaches, to clear away the ruins, and with bales
of wool and other materials to form defences behind the opening.
They ranged also a number of huge shells and barrels of powder,
with matches fastened to them, along the ramparts, and placed
chosen men to defend the breach, each man being supplied with
four muskets.
In this order they fearlessly awaited another attack, which was
soon made. For intelligence now arrived that Drouet’s corps was
close to Llerena, and that Marmont was on the move from
Salamanca, and hence lord Wellington, seeing that his prey was
likely to escape, as a last effort resolved to assault Christoval again.
But this time four hundred British, Portuguese, and French men of
the Chasseurs Britanniques, carrying sixteen long ladders, were
destined for the attack; the supports were better closed up; the
appointed hour was nine instead of twelve, and a greater number of
detachments than before were distributed to the right and left to
distract the enemy’s attention, to cut off his communication with the
town, and to be ready to improve any success which might be
obtained. On the other side Phillipon increased the garrison of the
fort to two hundred men.
S E C O N D A S S A U LT O F C H R I S TO VA L .
The storming party was commanded by major M‘Geechy; the

forlorn hope, again led by the gallant Dyas, was accompanied by Mr.
Hunt, an engineer officer, and a little after nine o’clock the leading
troops bounding forward, were immediately followed by the support,
amidst a shattering fire of musketry which killed major M‘Geechy, Mr.
Hunt, and many men upon the glacis. The troops with loud shouts
jumped into the ditch, but the French scoffingly called to them to
come on, and at the same time rolled the barrels of powder and
shells down, while the musketry made fearful and rapid havoc. In a
little time the two leading columns united at the main breach, the
supports also came up, confusion arose about the ladders, of which
only a few could be reared, and the enemy standing on the ramparts,
bayonetted the foremost of the assailants, overturned the ladders,
and again poured their destructive fire upon the crowd below. When
a hundred and forty men had fallen the order to retire was given.
An assault on the castle breach might still have been tried, but the
troops could not have formed between the top, and the
retrenchments behind the breach, until Christoval was taken, and the
guns from thence used to clear the interior of the castle; hence the
siege was of necessity raised, because to take Christoval, required
several days more, and Soult was now ready to advance. The stores
were removed on the 10th, and the attack was turned into a
blockade.
O B S E RVAT I O N S .
1º. The allies lost, during this unfortunate siege, nearly four
hundred men and officers, and the whole of their proceedings were
against rules. The working parties were too weak, the guns and
stores too few, and the points of attack, chosen, not the best; the
defences were untouched by counter-batteries, and the breaching
batteries were at too great a distance for the bad guns employed;
howitzers mounted on trucks were but a poor substitute for mortars,
and the sap was not practised; lastly, the assaults were made before
the glacis had been crowned, and a musketry fire established
against the breach.
2º. That a siege so conducted should fail against such a brave and
intelligent garrison is not strange; but it is most strange and culpable
that a government, which had been so long engaged in war as the
British, should have left the engineer department, with respect to
organization and equipment, in such a state as to make it, in despite
of the officers’ experience, bravery, and zeal, a very inefficient arm of
war. The skill displayed belonged to particular persons, rather than to
the corps at large; and the very tools with which they worked,
especially those sent from the storekeeper’s department, were so
shamefully bad that the work required could scarcely be performed;
the captured French cutting-tools were eagerly sought for by the
engineers as being infinitely better than the British; when the
soldiers’ lives and the honour of England’s arms, were at stake, the
English cutlery was found worse than the French.
3º. The neglect of rules, above noticed, was for the most part a
matter of absolute necessity; yet censure might attach to the
general, inasmuch as he could have previously sent to England for a
battering train. But then the conduct of the Portuguese and British
governments when lord Wellington was in the lines, left him so little
hope of besieging any place on the frontier, that he was hourly in
fear of being obliged to embark: moreover, the badness of the
Portuguese guns was not known, and the space of time that elapsed
between the fall of Badajos and this siege, was insufficient to
procure artillery from England; neither would the Portuguese have
furnished the means of carriage. It may however at all times be
taken as a maxim, that the difficulties of war are so innumerable that
no head was ever yet strong enough to fore-calculate them all.
CHAPTER VI.
It will be remembered, that Soult instead of retiring into 1811.
Andalusia, took a flank position at Llerena, and awaited the June.
arrival of Drouet’s division, which had been detached from
Massena’s army. At Llerena, although closely watched by general
Hill, the French marshal, with an army, oppressed by its losses and
rendered unruly by want, maintained an attitude of offence until
assured of Drouet’s approach, when he again advanced to Los
Santos, near which place a slight cavalry skirmish took place to the
disadvantage of the French.
On the 14th, Drouet, whose march had been very rapid, arrived,
and then Soult, who knew that lord Wellington expected large
reinforcements, and was desirous to forestal them, Intercepted
advanced to Fuente del Maestro, whereupon Hill took despatch from
Soult to Marmont.
measures to concentrate the covering army on the
position of Albuera. Meanwhile Marmont, who had reorganized the
army of Portugal, in six divisions of infantry and five brigades of
cavalry, received Napoleon’s orders to co-operate with Soult; and in
this view had sent Reynier with two divisions by the pass of Baños,
while himself with a considerable force of infantry and cavalry and
ten guns escorted a convoy to Ciudad Rodrigo. General Spencer,
with the first, fifth, sixth, and light divisions, and one brigade of
cavalry, was then behind the Agueda; and Pack’s Portuguese
brigade was above Almeida, which had been again placed in a
condition to resist an irregular assault. Spencer’s orders were to
make his marches correspond with those of the enemy, if the latter
should point towards the Tagus; but if the French attacked, he was to
take the line of the Coa, and to blow up Almeida if the movements
went to isolate that fortress. On the morning of the 6th, Marmont,
having introduced his convoy, marched out of Rodrigo in two
columns, one moving upon Gallegos, the other upon Espeja. The
light division fell back before the latter, and Slade’s cavalry before
the former; but in this retrograde movement, the latter gave its flank
obliquely to the line of the enemy’s advance, which soon closed
upon, and cannonaded it, with eight pieces of artillery. Unfortunately
the British rear-guard got jammed in between the French and a piece
of marshy ground, and in this situation the whole must have been
destroyed, if captain Purvis, with a squadron of the fourth dragoons,
had not charged the enemy while the other troopers, with strong
horses and a knowledge of the firmest parts, got through the marsh.
Purvis then passed also, and the French horses could not follow.
Thus the retreat was effected with a loss of only twenty men. After
the action an officer calling himself Montbrun’s aide-de-camp
deserted to the allies.
General Spencer, more distinguished for great personal intrepidity
than for quickness of military conception, was now undecided as to
his measures; and the army was by no means in a safe situation, for
the country was covered with baggage, the movements of the
divisions were wide, and without concert, and general Pack who had
the charge of Almeida too hastily blew it up. In this uncertainty the
adjutant-general Pakenham pointed out that the French did not
advance as if to give battle, that their numbers were evidently small,
their movements more ostentatious than vigorous, and probably
intended to cover a flank movement by the passes leading to the
Tagus: he therefore urged Spencer either to take up a position of
battle which would make the enemy discover his real numbers and
intentions, or retire at once behind the Coa, with a view to march to
lord Wellington’s assistance. These arguments were supported by
colonel Waters, who, having closely watched the infantry coming out
of Ciudad Rodrigo, observed that they were too clean and well
dressed to have come off a long march, and must therefore be a part
of the garrison. He had also ascertained that a large body was
actually in movement towards the passes.
Spencer yielding to these representations marched in the evening
by Alfayates to Soito, and the next day behind the Coa. Here certain
intelligence, that Marmont was in the passes, reached him, and he
continued his march to the Alemtejo by Penamacor, but detached
one division and his cavalry to Coria, as flankers, while he passed
with the main body by Castello Branco, Vilha Velha, Niza, and
Portalegre. The season was burning and the marches long, yet so
hardened by constant service were the light division, and so well
organized by general Craufurd, that, although covering from
eighteen to eight-and-twenty miles daily, they did not leave a single
straggler behind. The flanking troops, who had been rather
unnecessarily exposed at Coria, then followed, and Marmont having
imposed upon Spencer and Pack by his demonstration in front of
Ciudad Rodrigo, filed off by the pass of Perales, while Reynier
moved by the passes of Bejar and Baños, and the whole were by
forced marches soon united at the bridge of Almaraz. Here a
pontoon bridge expected from Madrid had not arrived, and the
passage of the Tagus was made with only one ferry-boat which
caused a delay of four days, which would have proved fatal to
Badajos, if the battering guns employed in that siege had been really
effective.
When the river was crossed, the French army marched in two
columns with the greatest rapidity upon Merida and Medellin, where
they arrived the 18th, and opened their communications with Soult.
On the other side, lord Wellington had been attentively watching
these movements; he had never intended to press Badajos beyond
the 10th, because he knew that when reinforced with Drouet’s
division, Soult alone would be strong enough to raise the siege, and
hence the hurried assaults; but he was resolved to fight Soult, and
although he raised the siege on the 10th, yet, by a deciphered
intercepted letter, that Phillipon’s provisions would be exhausted on
the 20th, he continued the blockade of the place, in hopes that some
such accident of war as the delay at Almaraz might impede
Marmont. It may be here asked, why, as he knew a few days would
suffice to reduce Badajos, he did not retrench his whole army and
persist in the siege? The answer is that Elvas being out of repair,
and exhausted both of provisions and ammunition, by the siege of
Badajos, the enemy would immediately have taken that fortress.
When Soult’s advanced guard had reached Los Santos, the
covering army, consisting of the second and fourth divisions and
Blake’s Spaniards was concentrated at Albuera, Hamilton’s
Portuguese were also directed there from Badajos; meanwhile the
third and seventh divisions maintained the blockade, and Wellington
expecting a battle repaired in person to Albuera, but, unlike
Beresford, he had that position entrenched, and did not forget to
occupy the hill on the right.
On the 14th, it was known that Marmont was at Truxillo, and that in
four days he could unite with Soult, wherefore the blockade was also
raised with a view to repass the Guadiana, yet Wellington still
lingered at Albuera hoping to fall on Soult separately, but the
cautious manner in which the latter moved, continually refusing his
left and edging with his right, towards Almendralejos, soon
extinguished this chance; on the 17th, the blockade having been
raised the day before, the allies repassed the Guadiana in two
columns. The British and Portuguese moved by the pontoon bridge
near Badajos, the Spaniards crossed at Jerumenha;—this
movement, not an easy one, was executed without any loss of men
or stores, and without accident, save that general William Stewart by
some error, took the same line as Blake, and at night fell in with the
Spaniards, who thought his division French and were like to have
fired.
The 19th the united French armies entered Badajos, which was
thus succoured after two most honourable defences, and at a
moment when Phillipon, despairing of aid and without provisions,
was preparing his means of breaking out and escaping.
The 21st Godinot’s division which had marched by Valverde took
possession of Olivenza; the 22d he pushed a detachment under the
guns of Jerumenha, and the same day the whole of the French
cavalry crossed the Guadiana in two columns, advancing towards
Villa Viciosa and Elvas on one side, and Campo Mayor on the other.
Lord Wellington being now joined by the head of Spencer’s corps,
had placed his army on both sides of the Caya, with cavalry posts
towards the mouth of that river and on the Guadiana in front of
Elvas. His right wing was extended behind the Caya to the lower
bridge on that river, and his left wing had a field of battle on some
high ground resting on the Gebora, a little beyond Campo Mayor,
which fortress was occupied, and the open space between it and the
high ground strongly entrenched. On this side also cavalry were
posted in observation beyond the Gebora and about Albuquerque,
the whole position forming an irregular arch embracing the bridge of
Badajos. The wood and town of Aronches were behind the centre of
the position and the little fortified place of Ouguella was behind the
left; but the right wing was much more numerous than the left, and
the Monte Reguingo, a wooded ridge between Campo Mayor and
the Caya, was occupied by the light division, whose position could
not be recognized by the enemy.
If the French attacked the left of the allies, a short movement
would have sufficed to bring the bulk of the troops into action on the
menaced point, because the whole extent of country occupied did
not exceed ten or twelve miles: the communications also were good,
and from Campo Mayor open plains, reaching to Badajos, exposed
the French movements which could be distinguished both from
Elvas, from Campo Mayor, and from the many atalayas or watch-
towers on that frontier.
The chief merit of this position was the difficulty of recognizing it
from the enemy’s side, and to protect the rear, the first division was
retained at Portalegre: from thence it could intercept the enemy at
Marvão or Castello de Vide if he should attempt to turn the allies by
Albuquerque; and was ready to oppose Soult if he should move
between Elvas and Estremos; but the march from Portalegre was too
long to hope for the assistance of this division in a battle near Elvas
or Campo Mayor.
The French cavalry, as I have said, passed the Guadiana on the
21st, both by the bridge of Badajos and by two fords, where the road
of Olivenza crosses that river, below the confluence of the Caya. The
right column after driving back the outposts of the allies, was
opposed by the heavy dragoons, and by Madden’s Portuguese, and
retired without seeing the position on the Campo Mayor side; but the
horsemen of the left column, while patrolling towards Villa Viciosa
and Elvas, cut off a squadron of the eleventh dragoons, and the
second German hussars which were on the Guadiana escaped to
Elvas with difficulty and loss. The cause of this misfortune in which

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Animal Biography: Re-framing Animal

Lives 1st ed. Edition André Krebber

Animal Rights Education 1st ed. Edition Kai Horsthemke

Animal Locomotion (C Oabs T Oxford Animal Biology) 2nd

Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare 1st

Exotic Animal Formulary 5th Edition

Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World 1st

Animal Theologians Andrew Linzey

Small Animal Soft Tissue Surgery 2nd 2nd Edition Eric

Animal Diversity 8th Edition, (Ebook PDF)

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957697

The contributions in this volume were selected and adapted from a

1 Introduction: Biographies, Animals and Individuality 1

2 Living, Biting Monitors, a Morose Howler and Other

3 Finding a Man and his Horse in the Archive? 41

4 Recovering and Reconstructing Animal Selves in Literary

5 A Dog’s Life: The Challenges and Possibilities of Animal

6 “We Know Them All”: Does It Make Sense to Create a

7 Animal Life Stories; or, the Making of Animal Subjects

8 Taxidermy’s Literary Biographies 141

9 Caesar: The Rise and Dawn of a Humanimalistic Identity 161

10 Postscript, Posthuman: Werner Herzog’s “Crocodile” at

11 The Elephant’s I: Looking for Abu’l Abbas 207

12 Topsy: The Elephant We Must Never Forget 227

13 Online Animal (Auto-)Biographies: What Does It Mean

Matthew Chrulew is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Culture

Markus Krzoska is Lecturer in History at Justus-Liebig-University

Radhika Subramaniam is a curator, editor, and writer interested in

Fig. 5.1 An undated photograph of Hachikō likely lying on the ground

Introduction: Biographies, Animals

André Krebber and Mieke Roscher

A. Krebber (*) • M. Roscher

© The Author(s) 2018 1

a (post)modern sentimental interest, individual animal lives, both real and

(Animal) Biography: A Historical Synopsis

that the nature of biography is still to be regarded as undetermined. The

individual biographies may be largely untraceable.16 Methodologically,

rendering the animal’s mind, thoughts and way of experiencing into

biography recoiled exemplarily, if opening on the individual nevertheless

famously democratized the biography by claiming that “anyone who has

how “charismatic or confounding creatures shape the life of the animal

social meta-level, without, however, depriving the protagonists of their

primatological fieldwork as well as on the narrative structures of the texts,

reading of all sources available, moreover thickened by contemporary

Hamilton, Nigel. Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

SECOND ENGLISH SIEGE OF BADAJOS.

There is no operation in war so certain as a modern siege, 1811.

The storming party, commanded by major M‘Intosh, of the 85th

The storming party was commanded by major M‘Geechy; the

You might also like

1 Introduction: Biographies, Animals and Individuality 1

2 Living, Biting Monitors, a Morose Howler and Other

3 Finding a Man and his Horse in the Archive? 41

4 Recovering and Reconstructing Animal Selves in Literary

5 A Dog’s Life: The Challenges and Possibilities of Animal

6 “We Know Them All”: Does It Make Sense to Create a

7 Animal Life Stories; or, the Making of Animal Subjects

8 Taxidermy’s Literary Biographies 141

9 Caesar: The Rise and Dawn of a Humanimalistic Identity 161

10 Postscript, Posthuman: Werner Herzog’s “Crocodile” at

11 The Elephant’s I: Looking for Abu’l Abbas 207

12 Topsy: The Elephant We Must Never Forget 227

13 Online Animal (Auto-)Biographies: What Does It Mean