Humanimalia

29/08/2026

I suppose this also says something about the price of chips in seaside towns.

71 per cent of Britons surveyed confessed they’d had food stolen or targeted by a seagull

19/08/2026

A new study suggests that we are not the only animals that like to take care of other species. The roots of wanting a pet companion may stretch deep into our primate past. https://nyti.ms/3Sk3d1v

17/08/2026

Thai cat treatises — called “Tamra Maew” — pair illustrations of auspicious felines with poetic notes: one has “eyes like dewdrops on a lotus,” another’s are “lit like fireflies, applied liquid gold”. Pages of a fine 19th-century example here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/tamra-maew/

17/08/2026

16/08/2026

So you want to know what it's like to be a bat?

Having roost-mates isn't without challenges... 😶

🦇 Straw-colored fruit bat
📷 Standa Pavouk/ iNaturalist

14/08/2026

Scales reptilian

Happy World Lizard Day!

Here's an x-ray of a Green Lizard, from an early volume of X-rays produced by Josef Maria Eder (1855–1944), a director of an institute for graphic processes, and Eduard Valenta (1857–1937), a photochemist, both from Austria. More here: https://buff.ly/2pV87RK

Buy as a print, along with others from the series, here: https://publicdomainreview.org/shop/fine-art-prints/artist/josef-maria-eder-and-eduard-valenta

14/08/2026

OUT NOW: Humanimalia 16.2 (2026), special issue on “Animal Scales”, curated by Mariam Motamedi Fraser and Martin Savransky.

Featuring contributions by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka on the Social Territorial Foundations of Animal Politics, Alasdair Cochrane on Interspecies Political Scales and the Question of Legitimacy, and Eva Meijer on Multispecies Commoning and Uncommoning; Éric Baratay on History on the Side of Animals, Thomas Rath on Time, Species, and Human–Animal Relations in Modern Latin America, and Sophie Page on Animal Histories, Behavioural Plasticity, and the Medieval Past; Dinesh Wadiwel on Industrial Scale Surrogacy, Andrew Barry on Biochemistry and Metabolic Scales, and Kathryn Gillespie on The Spatial-Temporal Regimes and Affective Ruptures of Farmed Animals’ Reproductive Labour; and last but not least Anat Pick in conversation with filmmaker Andrea Arnold on the scale of the individual life, from eyes open to eyes closed.

Plus research articles by Louis van den Hengel, Leonie Cornips, and Daniel Hellmann (aka Soya the Cow) on trans*species encounters and the ethics of care; Shumon T. Hussain and Dominik Ohrem on environmental learning and the challenges of more-than-human historiography and archaeology; Francesca Dennstedt on the role of insects in shaping the representation of gender and sexual dissidence in Mexico; and Miyabi Goto on speech and silence and the violence of language in a short story by Kenji Miyazawa.

Also including reviews by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth on Carol Gigliotti’s The Creative Lives of Animals; Lotte Suardi on Animals and Science Fiction, edited by Nora Castle and Giulia Champion; Carol Gigliotti on The Omnivore’s Deception by John Sanbonmatsu; Peter Sands on Tom Tyler’s Game; and finally Guillem Rubio Ramon on Straying with Street Dogs by Eva Meijer and Aron Nor.

As always, the issue is completely free and open access. You can read it, and the entire back catalogue, here: https://humanimalia.org/issue/view/1756

09/08/2026

For International Cat Day... the 1911 book Kittens and Cats: A First Reader by Eulalie Osgood Grover (with photographs almost certainly by Harry Whittier Frees). If this book is anything to go by then taking photos of cats and furnishing them with an amusing caption was a thing long before the internet... https://buff.ly/2nnXwxK

Frees always denied the use of dead or taxidermied animals in his photographs and insisted only humane methods were used. This certainly seems it could be the case looking at the photos featured here, but one can't help but wonder if this is the case in his later work which involved more complex tableaus.

20/07/2026

Dogs have been bred over millennia to meet our eyes with their own, offering a gaze of gratitude rather than one of appetite or fear. They are creatures of the nose, above all, olfactory rather than optical in their primary apprehensions. Yet in the course of our coevolution their eyes have come to mimic human eyes so that they would seem to look at us the way we look at them.

“Dogs live within a neat symbolic divide. On the one hand, they represent courage, an intrepid readiness to take risks on behalf of their beloved; on the other, they represent loyalty, a refusal to be removed from the presence of their families. The dog in art both walks ahead with the hunters and stays behind with the gatherers,” Adam Gopnik writes. Read about the depth of the relationship between humans and their canine companion, and how that love has been transferred into art: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/lQM6NO