Fierce, controversial, and caught between worlds—Heck cattle embody the complex intersection of dark history and modern conservation. This final episode of Season 5 of the Animal Highlight explores how these bovines were deliberately bred by Nazi zoologists in the 1920s and now find themselves at the center of rewilding debates across Europe.

Recorded: 14 December 2023 

 Featured: 

• Season 6 Grad Review on The Animal Turn
• The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 by Kathryn Gillespie 
• From “Nazi Cows” to Cosmopolitan “Ecological Engineers” by Jamie Lorimer and Clemens Driessen
• Conceptualizing the multispecies triadby Andrea Petitt 
• American Cows in Antarctica by Elizabeth Leane and Hanne Nielsen

 

Virginia Thomas is an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence). You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano).

 

Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Virginia Thomas, script write, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Sound clips taken from: BBC Sound Effects, xeno canto: https://xeno-canto.org/species/milvus-milvus  
• Learn more about the team here. 

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A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

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